Doug and Teri Johnson are now living a slower, calmer life in Cape Wolfe (photography by Stephen Harris)

The buyers:

Doug Johnson, a 58-year-old retired operations manager, and his wife, Teri, a 58-year-old retired medical lab technologist.

The budget:

$500,000

The backstory:

Doug and Teri spent their lives in St. Catharines, the southern Ontario city where they met in 1982 through friends. They raised their kids, Arlington and Olivia, in the same three-bedroom bungalow that Teri grew up in. Prior to the pandemic, the couple had been making plans for their retirement—which, they hoped, would include a prettier property with more land. “The bungalow wasn’t our dream home,” Doug says. “It was close to a busy road and our neighbours were right there.” Initially, the Johnsons were aiming to retire in 2024, but they reprioritized when Doug was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2020. “That made me say, ‘It’s time to relax and enjoy life,’ ” Doug says.

A wall of windows looks out onto the Northumberland Strait

They briefly considered relocating within the province—north to Collingwood or southwest to Leamington—but they knew that the $500,000 they’d likely net from the sale of their bungalow wouldn’t stretch very far in Ontario’s pricey market. Instead, they looked east to Prince Edward Island, which they’d visited three times on vacation. Doug fondly recalls beach trips, the requisite heaps of seafood and checking out the local music scene. “People really didn’t seem to be in a hurry—they’d strike up a conversation or stop in to let you know a ceilidh, or party, is going on down the road,” he says. P.E.I. checked the Johnsons’ most important box: less stress.

The hunt:

In February of 2021, Doug and Teri reached out to a Charlottetown-based realtor with a few more wish-list items: three bedrooms, a waterfront view and access to medical care for Doug close by. (Like the rest of the country, P.E.I. is facing a serious shortage of doctors.) Quarantine was still mandatory for out-of-province travellers, so the Johnsons had their realtor forward local listings. Properties were selling much quicker than they expected. First, they missed out on a three-bedroom ranch-style bungalow in northwestern Gordon Cove, and later, a three-bedroom raised bungalow in Cape Bear. They realized bidding wars aren’t as common in P.E.I. as they are in Ontario. Sellers out east often accept the first offers that come in.

The dining room

By April, the Johnsons were revisiting listings they’d once overlooked. One was for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom bungalow in Cape Wolfe, listed for $459,000. It was an hour northwest of Summerside, the closest city, but just a 25-minute drive from a hospital. A video tour, posted on YouTube, revealed a charming V-shaped home clad in a mosaic of custom stonework, with a new addition built by the previous owners. The sunny main entrance gave way to a living room with a wood-burning fireplace, which led to a sunroom with clear views of the Northumberland Strait.

Doug and Teri submitted an offer of $450,000, conditional on a home inspection, which the sellers accepted. The Cape Wolfe property was theirs, and they’d never stepped foot inside. “Everybody thought we were crazy,” Doug says. The couple stayed in the St. Catharines house for a few months until December, when it sold for $505,000. It was a good thing they had a place to sleep, because securing movers was nearly impossible. “Many of the companies were too busy moving other people to the East Coast,” Doug says. Last January, he and Teri finally settled in for good.

RELATED: The Move: Two working parents trek from B.C. to N.B. in search of affordable childcare

The Johnsons lost power for five days during Hurricane Fiona, but aside from some downed branches, the property remains mercifully intact. (Doug called it a good test for life in the Maritimes.) Packages are only delivered on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and Doug is still on the waiting list for a new GP. But then they’re also a short drive from a sea-glass-speckled beach, cycling on the Confederation Trail and ceilidhs with new friends in town. Teri even bought a keyboard and is taking lessons online. “I’ve always wanted to play,” she says. “I just never had the time.”

The obligatory lighthouse keeps watch along the shoreline

The post The Move: After a cancer diagnosis, this Ontario couple headed to P.E.I. to retire (and relax) appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photography courtesy of Sacha Roy)

In 2016, freelance filmmaker Sacha Roy moved out of his Quebec City condo and bought a one-acre property on top of a cliff for $10,000, near the small village of Wakefield, Quebec. The lot was off the provincial power grid—hence the rock-bottom price—and there, Roy planned to build a wood cabin that could be his weekend getaway. There was just one problem: he was a communications major with no construction background. He didn’t even own any tools.

Upending his life for an unbuilt home in the countryside was a risky move, but it was also a well-earned break. He worked seven days a week, often travelling across the world to shoot video content for an array of clients. In one three-month stretch earlier that year, he’d visited 25 countries, including Peru and El Salvador. When he came home, he realized he was completely burned out. 

An outdoor enthusiast since birth, Roy saw the wood cabin as a chance to escape from his old lifestyle. He used Air Miles to buy his first-ever handsaw and collected advice on how to build a cabin from friends in the construction industry, from strangers at the Wakefield hardware store and, predominantly, from YouTube. “It was complete trial and error,” says Roy. He replaced his network of gutters once, reconfigured his water filtration system twice and has taken four stabs at the plumbing. “In fact, it still is trial and error. This cabin hasn’t stopped evolving since its conception.”  

RELATED: A Toronto couple ditched their condo for a 260-square-foot custom RV

First, Roy laid concrete pads on his land and fashioned slabs of cedarwood onto them, creating a 556-square-foot shack with towering 18-foot ceilings. He added three sprawling windows to the south wall and insulated it all with mineral wool and Styrofoam. Inside, he built a partial second floor that holds a loft-style bedroom. The rest of the space became an open-concept living room with a sectional couch and a hammock that faces the windows. 

The living room flows into a quaint kitchen with a full-sized fridge, propane cooktop and wood stove, which helps heat the house along with eight solar panels scattered on his lot and a 3,500-watt generator. A corner of the main living space functions as an office, with satellite internet to ensure a strong Wi-Fi signal.

The building costs were higher than Roy anticipated. He estimates that he’s spent over $175,000, in part due to the provincial government forcing him to install his own septic system—which set him back $50,000—and his constant tinkering. Finding the proper waste system for the home was a challenge. At first, Roy had built a small outhouse, but later replaced it with an indoor composting toilet. He eventually parted ways with that too because he could not handle the smell. Instead, he installed a pedal toilet, which barely uses any water. “That’s a good example of how I’ve done things,” he says. “I start quite humble and slowly upgrade.”

Over the last seven years, he has also upgraded his solar panels, installed a rain catchment system, rebuilt his bedroom three times and redesigned the living room. “At first, I imagined a little shack in the woods where I could relax on weekends,” he says. “And then I fell in love with it and couldn’t stop trying to make it better.”

MORE: This vintage Ontario home combines retro space-age glamour with 21st-century perks

Roy made the cabin his permanent home in 2017, and he’s embraced the rugged lifestyle that comes with it. During most months of the year, he chops his own wood at the foot of the cliff, carries it up a hill on a 90-foot material elevator he built himself, and tosses it into the fire twice per day. In the winter, he clears the roads, shovels snow away from the solar panels and monitors water levels. 

Supplying the cabin with enough water is a constant challenge. A system of gutters captures rainwater and funnels it through a six-litre vat in a small shed a few metres away from the house. From there, a 12-volt pump shoots the water through a UV filter, which purifies it and makes it ready to drink. Roy had originally installed his filtration system on his home’s second floor, but relocated it outside after a rainstorm caused it to overflow inside, making a mess of water and tree debris. The water supply occasionally runs low in the winter when rain turns to snow, so Roy limits himself to three showers per week and outsources his laundry to a friend’s house. Recently, he replaced his rusting metal bathtub with a cast-iron-foot tub—a longtime dream of his.

In 2019, Roy started dating his partner, Anna, a conflict resolution worker, and she moved in with him soon after. “It was a huge leap of faith to start living together so early and in a space like this,” he says. “In the early days, we were still pooping outside.” He couldn’t leave the place for more than a week at a time because the water tank would fill and snow would pile onto the property. Now, the couple live there year-round. Roy still works as a filmmaker, and Anna takes over the daily chores when he leaves for his long video shoots.

Even then, he doesn’t like being gone for extended periods of time: seven years of fine-tuning has left him attached to his abode—so much so that he would never consider moving out. “Way too much work went into this for me to sell,” Roy says. “It’s a source of pride, and working on it keeps my stress levels down. It’s my baby.”

The post A filmmaker built this wood cabin from scratch on a cliff in Quebec appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photography by Renaud Lafrenière)

In 2019, Martin Dumas, a graphic designer, and Maude Beaupré, a TV associate producer, felt cramped in their Montreal apartment. They had been renting a three-bedroom place in the Little Burgundy neighbourhood for the past 12 years, paying $865. After their daughter, Simone, was born in 2012 and began to grow up, the couple realized they needed more space in their home. They started imagining a change—preferably to a leafier, pastoral setting.

Dumas and Beaupré hoped to find a rambling old house in the countryside filled with vintage character, as opposed to a cookie-cutter new build in a suburb. That September, Dumas sketched a crude illustration of an A-frame cottage with a squat addition on a pink Post-it note. He joked to Beaupré that he had just drawn the house of his dreams. A day later, their realtor sent over a listing for a small home with a stucco exterior that bore a strange resemblance to his illustration. “My boyfriend doesn’t believe in the idea that the universe sent it to us, but we were in shock,” says Beaupré.

She runs an Instagram account, @stalker.fever, where she collects images of quirky interiors she finds on real estate listings. The house fit right in, but it was further from Montreal than they liked in the rural Rawdon township, which is an hour’s drive north. The couple still agreed to see it, and as soon as they toured the place, they were sold.

RELATED: Habitat: This vintage Ontario home combines retro space-age glamour with 21st-century perks

Built in 1968, their home looks like a tiny bungalow from the outside and a 1970s fever dream on the inside. The decor emphasizes a retro brown and orange colour scheme, which fits well with the mid-century aesthetic Dumas and Beaupré had already cultivated in their Montreal apartment. They moved in most of their old furniture, and the rest, including the orange couch with chrome detailing in the living room, was left over from the previous owners.

“It feels great to be in this groovy yet soothing space, surrounded by trees and tranquility,” Beaupré says. The main bathroom features an avocado green toilet, bathtub and sink, and the abundance of wood detailing in the kitchen adds warmth—especially when the day approaches sunset. Light floods the expansive living room, which is elongated with cathedral ceilings and a split-level layout. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame a panoramic view of the backyard, and a black fireplace is set against a red-and-white brick wall.

There are also practical considerations to make when it comes to modern life in a vintage build. Dumas, who is six-foot-one, often hits his head on the alcove above the stove in the kitchen. The house is not as energy efficient as newer places, so the monthly hydro bills are high. If something breaks, service workers are often hesitant about doing repairs out of concern they will damage the house. “One of my worst fears is that something will happen to the plumbing, and I will have to rip up one of the bathrooms,” Beaupré says. “I keep thinking: ‘Just hold on for one more year!’”

MORE: An Ontario couple converted this 130-year-old church into a charming family home

Certain retro design choices were also initially off-putting. The kitchen’s striking decor included bright orange tiling and wooden walls, a built-in Jenn-Air grill and a supposedly soundproof padded ceiling that, according to Beaupré, resembles “cooked spaghetti.” But over time, the couple saw how these features fit in with their place’s overall aesthetic, and they decided to run with it. The home’s unique design has even become an object of fascination for others. After Beaupré joined a location scouting group on Facebook, it was featured in several Québécois artists’ music videos and a fashion campaign for the glasses brand BonLook.

“There’s something very sexy about this home,” says Beaupré. The primary bedroom has a mirrored ceiling, but the crown jewel is the Jacuzzi room, which is furnished with a built-in sauna, beige carpeting and textured walls. Whenever guests visit, she always tells them to bring a bathing suit. One day, she also hopes to invite over one of the original owner to swap stories about what these walls have witnessed in the copacetic 70s. “It’s pretty rare that you see vintage houses for sale that are in pristine condition,” Beaupré says. “I like to imagine the parties that were thrown here.”

The post This small-town Quebec home is a retro lover’s paradise appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“The dents, the imperfections, they tell a story.” (Photography by Sarah Burtscher)

In early 2021, Lee and Rebecca Loewen were expecting their first child. They rented a 550-square-foot apartment above a store in downtown Toronto that Lee, an industrial designer, had fashioned into a loft. It was an upgrade from their previous 320-square-foot shoebox in the city, but the couple hoped to build a place they could own. “It was the pandemic, and we had time to be creative,” says Rebecca, who works for a not-for-profit. “We wanted to throw ourselves into a project.”

Around that time, Lee’s friend Payam Shalchian approached him with a business idea: they could construct compact, wooden, permit-free cabins and sell them as temporary alternative living spaces. Given Canada’s exorbitant housing prices and the increasing popularity of sustainable living, the pair figured that an cost-effective home with a small footprint could be a popular product. They founded the company Instead Tiny Homes, and Lee agreed to spearhead the prototype development on one condition: that he could move into it with Rebecca and their baby when it was finished. “We thought: ‘If we’re bringing this concept to life, let’s live in one and test it out for ourselves.’”

Buying land and building in Toronto was too expensive, so the Loewens left their condo and moved 200 kilometres east to Prince Edward County, where they stayed in a short-term rental. “It felt strange to have so much change happening at once,” says Rebecca. “Any time I developed a sense of routine, I was thrown a curveball, but I tried to embrace the adventure of it all.”

RELATED: The Move: Two working parents trek from B.C. to N.B. in search of affordable childcare

Once in the country, Lee got to work with Shalchian to execute their vision. Over nine months, they assembled sheets of plywood into a sturdy 32-by-8.5-foot rectangular cabin, built with wheels on a trailer chassis. It was painted black with 13-foot ceilings and expansive windows, and it has a heat-recovery ventilator to ensure good air exchange. “The idea was to make it an RV and spend the money we would have shelled out on a mortgage to travel the country,” says Rebecca.

The couple attached their new abode to a tow truck and lugged it 30 kilometres to their friends’ quarter-acre lakeside lot in Prince Edward County. After Rebecca gave birth to their son, Max, five weeks early, the young family moved into their new place, which still needed some finishing touches. “For the first two weeks, we were essentially glamping and feeding Max at midnight by lantern, cooking over a fire pit and borrowing showers at friends’ homes,” says Lee. To squeeze into their 260-square-foot home, they had to part ways with items they no longer miss, like extra cabinets from IKEA, bags of clothing and miscellaneous clutter.

Meanwhile, Lee and Payam built a small outdoor utility shed to store solar batteries and a 2,000-gallon water tank, tacked 12 solar panels onto the shed’s roof and installed a propane furnace. They furnished the family room, turned the primary bedroom into a loft and wrapped up work on the main-floor bathroom and kitchen, which they outfitted with a stainless-steel countertop and granite sink.

MORE: The Move: Kelowna, B.C. to Nova Scotia for a breath of fresh air

Total building costs ran to $145,000, not including Lee and Payam’s labour The Loewens pay barely $3,000 per year in utilities, and their home needs minimal light and heat. The surrounding windows keep the interior bright from sunrise to sundown, and it stays toasty on the coldest days with airtight rockwool insulation, ZIP System R-sheathing, a furnace and the occasional power generator boost. “We’ve now spent two winters in the place, and it’s warm even on -27 degree days,” says Lee.

Moving off grid, however, has its challenges: most weekdays, they have to drive 25 minutes to a work-share space to access a strong Wi-Fi signal. They also have yet to take their rolling home on the road—for the time being, it remains on their friend’s property. “We realized it was built more like a high-performance house than an RV, so it’s heavy to drag along,” says Lee. “Unhooking it from our solar and water lines can get complicated.”

Raising a kid in an enclosed space also tests the couple’s patience. “Max occasionally likes to pick up heavy objects and slam them against the walls,” says Lee. His playtime has affected Instead Tiny Homes’s design choices. “We were a bit more focused on aesthetics than durability,” Lee explains. “Now I wouldn’t recommend the plywood floors to a client because they dent easily.”

For now, the Loewens are going to stay in Prince Edward County. Not only is it the best move for business—they’re a short drive away from the company’s warehouse—but moving back to Toronto would require them to own the land on which they park, which Lee says can be pricey. In the meantime, Instead Tiny Homes plans to expand its line of alternative, energy-efficient homes, and Lee is working with Shalchian to create their first two-bedroom, 520-square-foot home, which they will place on a permanent foundation by November.

“The dents, the imperfections, they tell a story,” says Rebecca. “I feel a sense of pride about the space we’re in—it feels like home.”

The post A Toronto couple ditched their condo for a 260-square-foot custom RV appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The Tynedals outside their home in Winnipeg (photography by Jessica Lee)

The buyers:

Evan Tynedal, a 34-year-old self-employed sales representative; Vanessa Tynedal, a 38-year-old account executive; and their kids: Chloe, who’s eight, Jace, who’s five and Avigail, who’s two.

The budget:

$450,000

The backstory:

One phrase that perfectly describes Vanessa and Evan’s love story and real estate journey: long-distance. In 2010, Vanessa was living in Winnipeg and Evan in Kelowna, but they met in Malibu during a work trip for top-performing employees hosted by the sales and marketing firm where they both worked. Both were in relationships at the time, but they kept in touch as friends. As fate would have it, just a few months later, their company moved them both to Ontario to handle different campaigns—Vanessa to Hamilton and Evan to Oshawa. One night, they decided to meet in the middle. “When we found out we were both single, we immediately started flirting,” says Vanessa. They dated for a few years, then got married in 2014. Chloe came along shortly afterwards.

Avigail (centre) was born just weeks after the Tynedals moved into their new home in Winnipeg’s Garden City neighbourhood

The Tynedals’ journey to becoming homeowners was less serendipitous. By the time Chloe reached toddlerhood, the couple were living in an apartment on the top level of a detached house in Oshawa. “Our parents were kind of pushing us to find a place,” says Evan, recalling that Chloe had entered a less-than-ideal climbing phase. In 2016, they began looking for their own property in earnest, but found themselves outflanked in bidding wars on the first two houses. “We gave up looking, then our realtor called us with another option a few months later,” Evan says.

The property in question was a 1,050-square foot brick bungalow with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, a typical starter home for the area. The couple won over the owners—“just barely,” Evan says—with a bid of $416,000. In order to afford their mortgage, the Tynedals realized they’d need to renovate and rent out the basement. They spent another $25,000 installing a kitchen and two downstairs bedrooms and took on two tenants, both long-time friends and coworkers. “Initially, I thought the neighbourhood was kind of sketchy,” Evan says, “but when we moved there, it was pretty peaceful.” That peace lasted for the Tynedals (and their basement tenants) for a while, even after little Jace came along in 2018 and Evan’s sister moved in following her divorce. Then 2020 happened.

All five of the bedrooms are located on the same floor, which makes for easy supervision of their three kids. (Chloe and Jace are pictured above.)

Vanessa was three months pregnant with Avigail at the onset of the pandemic. Despite having just set up a house of their own, the couple realized they wanted to be closer to family. Vanessa and Evan moved their whole brood to Calgary for four months, crashing with relatives. “We thought: What are we doing in Ontario?” Vanessa says. “All of us are happy out west.” By July, they were eyeing Winnipeg, where Vanessa’s dad had retired and was available to help with childcare. A call with a realtor friend set a move in motion. “He was like, ‘You guys need to get back to Ontario and sell your house—now,” Evan says. The pandemic real estate frenzy had just kicked off, and the Tynedals discovered they could sell their bungalow for $570,000— more than $150,000 above what they paid for it. The family high-tailed it back to Oshawa, spent two weeks prepping the home for sale, and put it on the market. It sold at asking within a few days.

RELATED: The Move: Two working parents trek from B.C. to N.B. in search of affordable childcare

The hunt:

That summer, the Tynedals moved in with Vanessa’s parents in Winnipeg while house-hunting. Friends suggested they narrow their search down to Linden Woods and River Heights, two of the city’s wealthier suburban enclaves. Linden Woods (average price: $460,000) had a mix of cookie-cutter homes built in the ’80s and newer condos, while River Heights (average price: $420,000) had more palatial homes and old-growth trees. Both areas had no shortage of schools, but neither of the neighbourhoods were compelling to the Tynedals, who found the homes in Linden Woods too small and River Heights too busy.

The Tynedals initially bid $450,000 for the 2,600-square-foot home. Its 30-year-old furnace secured them an extra $5,000 discount.

A move-in ready, 2,600-square foot home in Garden City—a 10-minute drive from Vanessa’s parents’ home in the Maples neighbourhood—captured their hearts. The five-bedroom, five-bathroom property had been listed even before the Tynedals sold their Oshawa home, but it was still on the market after they made their big move. Unlike the out-of-control Ontario market, Winnipeg’s homes weren’t selling like hotcakes at the time. “When we saw the place again, it was listed for $450,000, or $30,000 less,” Vanessa says. Another big bonus? Plentiful sidewalks. “A lot of neighbourhoods in the south end of the city have none,” Evan says. “If you have kids, where are you going to walk? On the road?”

The Tynedals initially placed a bid of $450,000, but after an inspection revealed a 30-year-old furnace, they knocked $5,000 off of their offer. They weren’t worried about competition, so Vanessa and Evan waited a week to have their mortgage approved. When they failed the stress test with their long-time bank due to Evan’s self-employment (and Vanessa’s unemployment), they were forced to apply for a mortgage at a credit union in Niverville, a town just south of Winnipeg. They got the all clear, and also heard from the Garden City sellers, who offered to lower the property’s price by another $5,000 to expedite the sale. “I was pregnant, so I was very antsy,” Vanessa says. The Tynedals closed on the house in late August. Avigail was born a few weeks later.

MORE:  The Move: This Ontario family found space and affordability in Calgary

The Tynedals don’t miss much about their old life in Oshawa, except for their friends. They occasionally socialize with their new neighbours in Winnipeg, who generously dropped off homemade challah bread as a welcome present. But Vanessa and Evan are enjoying their newfound privacy and the freedom to be as loud as they want—a necessity when you have three kids under 10. The biggest upgrade is their lower cost of living. The bills are a bit higher without tenants, but they’ve made up for it in square footage. Even their gas costs have been halved: the couple used to spend an average of $1,000 a month filling up their cars to travel to clients in Toronto. Plus, driving to visit extended family in Calgary takes now 12 hours, not 35. “I think it’s a good idea for people to move to areas that cost less and upgrade their life,” Evan says. “I feel badly for all the people stuck in big cities, paying massive bills for not a lot of space. That used to be us.”

Avigail, Vanessa, Evan, Jace and Chloe are enjoying their new life without tenants. The kids can now be as loud as they want.

The post The Move: A growing family upsizes in Winnipeg—at a fraction of Ontario’s prices appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photo by iStock, Illustration by Maclean’s)

In the summer of 2020, I was living in a three-bedroom house in Coquitlam, B.C., with my parents, my brother and my partner, Curtis. The rent was $3,000 a month, and split between all of us, it was affordable: Curtis and I only paid $250 each. It was nice living with family, but by that point, we’d done it for three years and were nearing the end of our 20s. In August, Curtis and I started to think about buying a place of our own. We wanted to start a family and adopt a dog, which we couldn’t do as renters.

We started saving up for a down payment, with a goal of setting aside $50,000. Curtis is a heavy-duty mechanic and I work as a coordinator at a university. Together, we earn a combined $165,000—a solid income for a young couple. Luckily, Curtis had been putting away money in his RRSPs for about a decade—a total of $40,000—which gave us a good head start.

In January of 2021, we started house-hunting in suburbs east of Vancouver. Our budget was around $550,000 and our bank approved us for a $700,000 mortgage. We were looking for a spacious apartment or townhouse between Burnaby and Langley where Curtis and I work, respectively. We hoped the extra bedrooms could be used to host family and guests, and one day, serve as our kids’ bedrooms.

In August 2021, after seeing more than 20 homes, we bought a three-bed, three-bath townhouse in Pitt Meadows for $631,000. We could either go with a variable mortgage at 1.35 per cent or a fixed mortgage at 2.1 per cent. Our mortgage broker and financial adviser both suggested we go with the variable rate. They were convinced that interest rates would stay low: they hadn’t spiked in 25 years, and Tiff Macklem, the governor of the Bank of Canada, said himself that interest rates would stay low for “a long time.” We decided on a variable mortgage at 1.35 per cent, which started at $2,421 a month.

READ: My mortgage payments rose almost $2,000 in a year

Things started off well for us. To save money, we did home renovations ourselves: we replaced carpets with vinyl; painted the ceilings, stairs, window frames, doors and cabinets; replaced the lights; installed new baseboards, fire detectors and a kitchen backsplash. The renovations cost us less than $10,000—Curtis got a discount on paint and other supplies through work. When it came to daily spending, we didn’t track our expenses or set a budget. We ate out a couple of times a week. We took our family out to the movies once a month, which usually cost $150, between dinner, tickets and snacks. Curtis and I both played in a spring hockey league, paying $500 each, and Curtis regularly brewed beer, spending about $50 a month on supplies.

In June of 2022, Curtis and I took a trip to Greece, where he proposed. It felt like our lives were moving in the right direction, but back home, interest rates were rising. We were told by our financial adviser that rates would go up by 0.25 per cent, but the jumps were much higher—by June, rates were already up by one per cent. We were frustrated with our advisers and terrified that our mortgage would spiral out of control.

By October, our payments rose to $3,229 a month. Curtis and I worried about our financial future. We travelled a lot in our 20s, backpacking in Europe, attending a wedding in Australia, watching Cirque du Soleil in Vegas. But now we had to question whether we could even afford to travel, given how much of our paycheque was going toward the mortgage. What if this gets out of control and we lose the house? We were on our own—our family couldn’t afford to bail us out if we needed it. We started wondering what our lives would be like as house-poor parents, unable to afford sports or extracurriculars for future kids. We wanted to start a family, but spending an extra $800 a month—or $9,600 a year—on mortgage payments was pretty much obliterating those plans. It was a tough pill to swallow.

I wasn’t eating or sleeping properly. I constantly checked the mortgage rates, read financial news and listened to podcasts on Canadian economics. It was all I could talk about with friends and family. Curtis was a lot more laid-back than me. If it came down to it, he figured he could use his handyman skills—operating heavy-duty machinery or painting homes—to earn some extra cash.

In December, Curtis and I decided to switch to a fixed rate, at 5.14 per cent, for about $3,340 a month for the next five years. We needed to put a stop to the anxiousness we felt, even if rates began to drop the next day. In early 2022, the Bank of Canada held the interest rate steady at 4.5 per cent, pretty much right after we switched to a fixed rate. Either way, we were happy to have a bit of stability.

RELATED: My mortgage is about to go up by at least $1,000 a month

We’ve had to curb our spending significantly. We buy our groceries wholesale and often in bulk, and try to buy used clothes and furniture. I used to drive to work three days a week but it was costing me $500 a month on gas and insurance, so now I take two buses and a Skytrain. A friend moved into one of our extra bedrooms and pays us $550 a month. We’re much stricter about our budgeting. At the start of the month, we use our first paycheques to pay off our property tax, internet, electricity and other bills along with half of our mortgage. Our second paycheques go toward the rest of the mortgage, savings and a little bit of personal spending. We each spend about $150 a month, which I normally put toward home appliances, gifts or leisure activities. Before, we spent between $300 and $400 a month each on ourselves. Instead of jetting off to Greece, we’ll be doing a lot more camping in B.C., at sites like Cultus Lake and Porteau Cove, this year. My father renovated an old sailboat, which we’ll take over to Victoria and up around Vancouver Island this summer.

Our goal is to save $20,000 before starting a family, to supplement my maternity leave and Curtis’s paternity leave. But because so much of our money goes toward our mortgage, we’ve only saved about $5,000. It’ll take another year of saving to get to our mark. We wanted to get married in 2024, but those plans have been pushed back indefinitely.

It feels like we did everything right—saved up for a down payment, pursued stable careers, purchased a home, did the renovations ourselves. And yet we can barely afford to start a family. Our lives completely revolve around our mortgage.

—As told to Mathew Silver

The post Our mortgage payments went up to more than $3,300 a month appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photography by David Nikolic)

When a 130-year-old church in Princeton, Ontario, went up for sale in 2018, Jonathon Harmer couldn’t shake the idea that the place would make a beautiful family home. An iron-and-woodworker by trade, Harmer had driven by the building with white front doors and an emerald steeple countless times while growing up in the nearby town of Drumbo. He was visiting a friend in B.C. when the church went on the market, so he enlisted his partner, Lynn Perreault, who lived nearby, to scope out the place.

Perreault stood in front of the 26-foot-tall building that had been largely untouched for a decade. It needed sweeping repairs: the ceilings and walls were due for a paint job, the scaffolding was coming apart and the floors needed to be sanded. But the pair were already considering buying their first home together, so where others saw a derelict church, they saw an opportunity. “Jonathon is a woodworker who tears down barns for a living, I build furniture and do interior design, and we’re both welder-fitters,” says Perreault. “So when this popped up, it felt like the perfect renovation challenge. We told each other: ‘Let’s transform this place into a home.’”

The couple bought the church in the fall of 2018 for approximately $300,000. By next April, Perreault and Harmer had sold their respective residences, Harmer had come back to Ontario, and the pair moved into a 300-square-foot trailer on the church’s half-acre property. With a team of friends and family, including Perreault’s 15-year-old son and Harmer’s 83-year-old father, they went to work from 6 a.m. to sundown, seven days a week, all led by Jean-Marc, Perreault’s contractor brother.

RELATED: This vintage Ontario home combines retro space-age glamour with 21st-century perks

Immediately, the project proved more complicated than expected: securing a mortgage to fund their renovations took weeks because local banks were hesitant to back such an unusual and lofty build. Then the construction got off to a rough start. The building team had to dig up the entire yard to install a new sewage system, redo all the electrical wiring and connect the building to the Princeton power grid before even starting renovations. “There was a point when we wondered if we’d bitten off a bit more than we could chew,” says Perreault.

After those hiccups came months of intensive construction. To store materials for the project, the team had to build a workshed outside. Then they constructed a front porch for the church made of timber, and erected cedar walls inside to separate the rooms in their new layout, which included a kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom and a grand room with brown and black arches. The second floor, meanwhile, was fashioned into a loft.

The team spent eight days removing carpets, and they also retiled and repainted the entire ceiling on 20-foot-tall scaffolds, only for Perreault to do it all again by herself when the couple realized they wanted a whiter paint. They toned down the church’s more religious features by removing the mosaic glass windows and donating most of the church pews to the Princeton congregation. As a nod to the building’s past, they kept the church bell and even rang it regularly during pandemic lockdowns to brighten the community’s mood.

Renovation costs had already surpassed half a million dollars, so Harmer and Perreault made it their goal to beautify the church on a budget. “I’ve always loved looking around for reclaimed materials in my design projects,” says Perreault. “It’s a real money saver and an adventure.” To build the staircase, they bought local cedar and sourced rebar and spindles from a nearby auction. The kitchen island used to be a 13-foot counter from a local hair salon, and the bench in the foyer was an old church pew. They flipped another pew on its side, hung it on the kitchen wall and fashioned it into a frame that holds the hood fan above the stove. Harmer and Perreault also bought vintage bathroom sinks and kept the classic hanging church lights to brighten up the place.

After seven months, the team finally wrapped up their project. “Our family made this possible, and easily the coolest part of living in this big space was having the ability to host them for meals and evenings together,” Harmer says. In time, people far beyond their family trees also began to admire the couple’s creation. When their realtor, Brian Ellis, posted a video of the finished church on TikTok, viewers from Sweden, Greece and Thailand asked Perreault and Harmer about their building process. The renovation garnered so much attention that they sold Chippy Church T-shirts and mugs, named after their home’s classic white doors that are painted in a naturally aged, chipped style. 

After living in the church for two years, Perreault and Harmer realized that although they were proud of their home, they also wanted a more remote lifestyle. In 2021, they sold the property for $1.2 million and moved two hours’ drive north to Burk’s Falls, Ontario. Still craving a challenge, the couple bought a second church, this time with the goal of converting it into a duplex. “We loved the first build so much that we want to do it somewhere else,” says Perreault. “We’re calling it the Chippy Church Journey 2.0.”

The post An Ontario couple converted this 130-year-old church into a charming family home appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The owners spotted the home while visiting friends who lived nearby (Photograph by Revelateur Studio)

In 2013, Tina Fetner and her husband, Lane Dunlop, were visiting a friend in the leafy Westdale neighbourhood of Hamilton, Ontario, when they stumbled across a for-sale sign on the lawn of a space-age-looking mid-century stucco bungalow. Hambly House—named for its first owner—was built in 1939, one of four remaining art moderne buildings in the Hamilton area attributed to designer Edward Glass. (Art moderne, a cousin of art deco, is known for its curves and horizontal lines.) Fetner, a sociology professor at McMaster University, and Dunlop, a retired music executive, discovered that the house had been sitting empty for a year in a state of shambolic disrepair. But its whimsical character attracted them, even though they weren’t looking for a new home. “The house just fits our personality,” says Fetner. “It’s a little bit sassy, just like us.”

The previous owner had attempted to preserve the home’s character during the restoration process, but their commitment to using historically accurate building methods had left the home unlivable. Single-glazed windows let in a draft, and the ivy and shrubs encasing the house had caused extensive water damage to the outside walls. The roots of the maple tree in the backyard were invading the foundation, and according to Dunlop, “If you pressed your finger against the basement wall, water would seep out.” Given the home’s condition, Fetner and Dunlop were able to purchase the architectural gem in 2013 for the bargain-basement price of $375,000.

The kitchen appliances in Hambly House are a whimsical shade of robin’s-egg blue (Photograph by Scott Annandale)

With a footprint of less than 1,000 square feet, the three-bedroom home needed to be updated for modern living. The kitchen was small and cramped, like the galley of a ship, with jutting, angled cupboards. The original pale-green tiles and fixtures in the bathroom had been overtaken by rust and needed to be replaced. To honour the home’s character, Fetner and Dunlop hired architect and family friend David Premi from DPAI Architecture, embarking on a two-year renovation aimed at bringing the house into the modern era while painstakingly preserving its vintage character.

The staircase was designed to flood the first floor with natural light (Photograph by Revelateur Studio)

Fetner and Dunlop ensured that some of the house’s original details remain intact. There’s a plaster ceiling in the downstairs living room that resembles pressed tin, with rose-and-thorn detailing. Built-in bookshelves line the room’s walls, where the couple display their art collection, which includes a piece by Vancouver artist Christine Breakell-Lee. They’ve even restored the basement to its original state, designed to look like a log cabin with faux wood knots and trompe l’oeil bird’s nests built into the moulded plaster walls.

RELATED:  Habitat: A B.C. construction worker sold his country house to build this eco-friendly floating home

Renovations revealed a porthole window in the hall closet (Photograph by Scott Annandale)

In the front entryway, Fetner and Dunlop took out a hall closet to reveal a circular porthole window that would have been hidden by coats. They also removed several walls to transform the kitchen and living room into an open-concept space that stretches from the front hallway to the back of the house, where they added a 150-square-foot dining room with floor-to-ceiling windows. The mid-century-style appliances by Elmira Stove Works are a kitschy robin’s-egg blue, giving the kitchen a bright and playful air. 

The newly added second floor has expansive windows (Photograph by Revelateur Studio)

The home was originally a bungalow, but the couple added a second storey in the form of an atrium with curved glass that had to be specially manufactured in Pennsylvania and crane-lifted atop the home. “We could see the concerned, quizzical look on our neighbours’ faces wondering what we were doing,” says Dunlop. The extra floor, which is flooded with natural light, has a new primary bedroom, an upstairs living room and an outdoor terrace. 

The living room still has a rose-and-thorn plaster ceiling (Photograph by Revelateur Studio)

“When you’re outside on the deck, it’s like being on the upper deck of a small boat,” says Dunlop. He can usually be found relaxing in a nook by the curved glass, where the sightline from the terrace rests directly on top of the trees. From there, he can mark what time of day it is by the passage of regular dog walkers or joggers. “Even though you’re inside, you really feel like part of the neighbourhood.”

This article appears in print in the April 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post Habitat: This vintage Ontario home combines retro space-age glamour with 21st-century perks appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photos courtesy Sotheby’s)

In October 2016, industrial designer Robert Iantorno dreamed up this low-maintenance, high-efficiency property as a home where he and his wife, Maria, could live and eventually retire. By July 2017, the Iantornos purchased a five-acre plot of land in Singhampton, 90 minutes north of Toronto, surrounded by sumac, wild raspberries, wildflower meadows and cedar forests.

Iantorno teamed up with architect Andy Thompson to complete the 3,163-square-foot home. Construction began in October 2017 and the Iantornos moved into their new property in October 2018, but two years later, the couple decided to RV through the southern U.S., so they rented the property out on Airbnb and to seasonal tenants. They now have plans to relocate to Nova Scotia and put their home on the market for $2,395,000.

The semicircular arch structure and corrugated steel were chosen for their strength. The home is attached to a six-foot-deep foundation. Then, on top of the steel, there are six inches of spray foam, a drainage layer and galvanized-steel roofing.

Just past the front door, there are guest bedrooms on either side. The barn doors are made of rough-sawn white pine and the flooring is diamond-polished concrete.

The original plan was for the Iantorno’s to live in the home well into their senior years. For accessibility, they installed a full bathroom on the ground floor with a walk-in shower. There’s an in-floor drain, teal glazed tiles from Spain (meant to invoke Mediterranean waters) and quarried limestone tiles on the walls, also from Spain. The walnut vanity cabinets are custom made, and there’s built-in lighting in the mirror. Just across from the main-floor bathroom, there’s also a mechanical room, with a washer and a dryer, plus a pantry with open-wire restaurant shelving.

The main hallway leads to an open kitchen, living and dining area. The ceilings here are 20 feet high.

READ: Habitat: A mid-century sanctuary by Ontario’s Chandos Lake  

In the kitchen, there’s a 14-foot island—a Mennonite-made maple butcher block—that seats four people.

The south end of the living room has a wall of triple-glazed, argon gas-filled windows. The main source of warmth is in-floor hydronic heating, but there’s also a cozy wood-burning fireplace in the living room

Iantorno and Thompson designed a second-floor mezzanine for the home’s primary suite. To reach it, there are open-tread stairs made of rough-sawn white pine

The upper level has white pine hardwood flooring. The primary bedroom space is an open loft, but it’s designed so that the bed itself isn’t visible from the lower level.

The primary ensuite has a separate water closet with a wall-hung Toto washlet bidet, a two-person soaker tub with a large chrome brass filler, an enclosed glass shower with the same Spanish glazed tiles as the main-floor bathroom, and a separate vanity area. LED lights illuminate the “flutes” of the arches, which Iantorno says is meant to evoke Art Deco style.

RELATED: Habitat: A B.C. construction worker sold his country house to build this eco-friendly floating home

This mezzanine space overlooks the great room.

Iantorno, a sports car and motorcycle enthusiast, calls this 1,200-square-foot shop his “garage mahal.” It has two garage doors on either side, which Iantorno will open in the summer when he’s hanging out inside.

In the summer of 2022, Iantorno added a wood-burning cedar barrel sauna and a cold plunge pool to appeal to short-term renters. The region is especially popular with winter sports enthusiasts—the property is a 10-minute drive to Devil’s Glen, a private ski club.

The post For $2.4 million, you can buy this net-zero corrugated-steel home in Ontario appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photography by Greg van Riel)

In the spring of 2007, Michael Cherney noticed a small lump on his tongue. After a biopsy, his family doctor delivered the diagnosis: mouth cancer. Within six weeks, Michael, a financial adviser, underwent surgery to remove the tumour. To recuperate, he headed to a quiet place with his wife, Shari: their 1960s cedar log cabin–style cottage on Chandos Lake, which they’d purchased the year before. “Being by the water brings me a sense of peace,” says Michael. During their stay, the couple’s affection for the cottage grew, and they spent every summer at Chandos Lake from then on. 

RELATED: Habitat: A B.C. construction worker sold his country house to build this eco-friendly floating home

The cottage, perched on a ledge with 100 wooden steps leading down to the lake, was in a state of disrepair when the Cherneys bought it. By 2016, mice were overrunning the property, mould bloomed in the basement and unsealed windows let in cold drafts. “We were hoping we could renovate it, but it was like putting lipstick on a pig,” says Michael. “It made sense to start from scratch.”

With the help of architect Cathy Garrido at Altius, the couple came up with a vision for a mid-century-modern sanctuary. “The words we kept using were ‘quiet’ and ‘calm,’” says Shari, who works as a nursing professor. The finished product, completed in 2019, is heavily influenced by Michael’s childhood home in Peterborough, which had been designed by legendary Canadian architect Eb Zeidler, the mastermind behind Ontario Place and the Eaton Centre. The new 3,200-square-foot cottage is decorated in earthy tones, with floor-to-ceiling windows that reveal the cerulean blue of the lake and a thicket of treetops. 

READ: Habitat: A former New York Times journalist built this beachside fortress in P.E.I.

The interior is sparsely furnished so as to not detract from the natural beauty enveloping their property. “We don’t have side tables or coffee tables yet,” says Shari. The open-concept space consists of five split levels, and the ceiling and kitchen are all built from Douglas fir imported from B.C.

Typically, the best lake view is reserved for a cottage’s primary bedroom, but Shari didn’t want to waste it on a room where they’d spend most of their time sleeping. Instead, Michael’s office is there, and he works at the same mid-century-modern children’s desk that used to be in his childhood bedroom. “It’s a wonder he gets anything done,” says Shari. The view has turned Michael into an amateur birdwatcher. “My first was a yellow-rumped warbler,” he says. “Then a pileated woodpecker.”

For the Cherneys, their cottage is much more than a summer getaway. When the pandemic struck, the couple expected to stay for 10 days and ended up living there for two and a half years. “Chandos is a beautiful community,” says Shari, who does yoga at a studio nearby and goes on regular walks with neighbours. Even after her arthritis diagnosis, she and Michael plan to enjoy the breezy lakeside pace of life and serene vista for as long as they can. “We always say we’ll carry each other down to the lake, if need be.” 

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(Photographs courtesy of Angie Bryant)

Annapolis Royal is a rustic Nova Scotia town with a population of just 460 people. Back in the 1920s, it was home to Edwin Stanton Fickes, a steel industrialist based in Pittsburgh, who commissioned the construction of a home in 1929. The building, which took six years to complete, sits on a 383-acre estate near the Annapolis River. Over the years, the old-fashioned five-bedroom property has received some contemporary upgrades and is currently on the market for $4.8 million.

The current owner of the home is former bookseller Nicholas Hoare and his wife, Margot, who call the place This Old Hoare House. The couple purchased the home in 2006 and retired to Annapolis Royal in 2013, with the intention of restoring the estate to its previous grandeur. The place was in shambles—there were leaky chimneys, moisture and mould on the walls, a waterlogged basement and 1930s circuitry. The restoration took seven years to complete.

The owners wanted to modernize the property while respecting the home’s foundation and unique art-deco design elements. The original slate and oak floors were repolished and refinished, stucco walls—which Fickes had commissioned from a Swiss artisan— were resurfaced. Most importantly to Hoare, the wall-to-wall custom-built bookshelves were kept intact: for the past decade, they’ve housed Hoare’s 18,000 books (mostly first editions).

The second-floor primary bedroom includes a sitting room, a dressing room and an electric Dimplex fireplace.

The updated main bathroom features a custom-fitted Thomas Crapper toilet imported from the U.K .and underfloor heating.

The property includes an apple orchard.

A butler’s pantry connects the kitchen and the dining room. New lighting was added during the house-wide electrical restoration. It took three kilometres of cable and eight electricians to rewire the house for 21st-century use.

In the kitchen are more built-in bookshelves. The living room features a Belgian STUV fireplace insert, Nova Scotia’s first. It took two painters 18 months and 60 unique colours to dress each of the 21 distinct rooms.

The second-floor media room used to be the servants’ quarters. It features exposed-wood crossbeams, century-old brick and the original servants’ staircase. There’s a 65-inch TV behind a secret panel.

Speaking of staircases: the main foyer has a spiralling gem that winds its way to the third floor, home to an attic bedroom for kids outfitted with a bunk bed and a walk-in cedar cabinet.

The fortress-like property is a one-of-a-kind build in Nova Scotia, featuring a copper roof weighing several tonnes and 18-inch-thick walls. Fickes was a steel magnate, so bridge-strength Pittsburgh steel supports the foundation.

The estate was also designed to be an impenetrable bunker. Fickes, who saw the possibility of World War Two looming, ordered his contractors to build 50,000-gallon cisterns underground, powered by two enormous boilers.

Outside the home, there’s an inscription above what was likely once the servants’ entrance. It reads: “Old Age, Good Health and Cheer, Bless All the Good Folk Here.” The contractors repointed the stone pillars during the restoration and relaid original slate slab on the front door walkway and side entrance.

The post For $4.8 million you can buy this nearly 400-acre historic Nova Scotia estate appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“We were seeing houses listed for $200,000 that were 100 times nicer than ours—and on beaches!” (Photograph courtesy of Hingley)

The buyers

Billie Jean Hingley, a 39-year-old registered nurse; K.C. Hingley, a 43-year-old musician; and their kids: Asher, who’s five, and Ember, who’s three.

The budget

$400,000

The backstory

Until recently, Billie Jean and K.C. had only ever called British Columbia home—she’s originally from the Sunshine Coast and he hails from Vancouver Island. In 2018, when Billie Jean got pregnant with Asher, the couple’s first child, they moved out of the two-bedroom townhouse they shared in Courtenay and bought a four-bedroom split-level detached model located on a family-friendly suburban cul de sac, an ideal spot for their growing brood. (They banked on having at least one more kid.)

READ: The Move: From Toronto’s rental grind to a quaint corner store in Quebec

The Hingley household was dual-income: Billie Jean worked as a registered nurse at a hospital in Comox Valley, while K.C. managed a local music store and toured a few weeks a year with PIGS, a Pink Floyd tribute band. But after their daughter, Ember, was born in 2019, the couple began to feel the financial pinch of B.C.’s steep daycare costs. Full-time spots for two kids set the Hingleys back $2,300 every month, and by September of 2021, the expense had landed them deep in debt. “We were living in overdraft,” Billie Jean says. “We felt pretty hopeless.”

The couple considered downsizing back into a townhouse, but B.C.’s housing market had gone berserk in the time since they’d had their kids. Factoring in moving costs, they realized they wouldn’t be much better off. K.C. had his own reservations. “A townhouse isn’t ideal for playing music and lugging gear in and out,” Billie Jean says. “Some of his equipment is temperature-sensitive, so even if we had a garage, we wouldn’t have been able to store it there.” 

An out-of-province move seemed like the only affordable option, so the Hingleys started sifting through listings in Alberta, Saskatchewan and as far as the East Coast. “We were seeing houses listed for $200,000 that were 100 times nicer than ours—and on beaches!” Billie Jean says. For the artsy couple, Nova Scotia, with its world-renowned music scene and vibrant kitchen parties, emerged as the market to beat. And for a family used to astronomical childcare costs, the fact that the province offered free pre-primary school only added to its appeal.

The hunt

That fall, the Hingleys connected with a realtor in Truro, Nova Scotia. They figured they could sell their Courtenay house for upward of $700,000 and set themselves a budget of $400,000, which would give them a low-enough mortgage to live comfortably. Their new place needed to have at least three bedrooms—on the same floor, to keep their kids close—and be located near a hospital where Billie Jean could find work. K.C.’s major requirement was an outbuilding that he could turn into a music studio. The Hingleys toured through local listings via FaceTime, from B.C., but faced a ton of competition from like-minded out-of-province buyers. They were regularly outbid by $30,000 to $50,000.

RELATED: The Move: Burned out in B.C.

Months went by before the Hingleys video-toured an attractive property just outside of Amherst, listed for $325,000. The house was painted a charming blue and sat on a property with rolling hills and a two-storey barn-style garage, ideal for K.C.’s music-mixing needs. They put in an offer that was conditional on a home inspection—which, unfortunately, revealed a number of issues. “There was a crack right down the centre of the roof,” Billie Jean says. “You could see into the attic.” The septic system was also leaking into a ditch in front of the home. Because of how the pipes were routed, fixing it would require putting in a new driveway. When the Hingleys asked the seller to knock $10,000 off the list price, negotiations ground to a halt.

Shortly afterward, the Hingleys’ realtor floated a three-bedroom home in Sackville, just over the border into New Brunswick. It was located in a picturesque neighbourhood near Mount Allison University, and solar panels provided 80 per cent of the home’s power, which the Hingleys loved. The design choices, not so much: there were sinks in every bedroom (“a bad idea if you have young children”) and an in-ground pool had decomposed into what Billie Jean calls “a very scary pond.” That listing might’ve been a dud, but it was a stepping stone to the Hingleys’ final destination: a six-bedroom, two-bathroom home in nearby Point de Bute.

MORE: The Move: This Ontario family found space and affordability in Calgary

The $320,000 property had three bedrooms on its upper level, plus three more on the main floor for guests. Built in 1860, it retained many of its original features, including a stained-glass window, rustic hardwood floors and a clawfoot tub. Elsewhere on the property was a fully electrified and insulated barn that could house K.C.’s studio, after some minor renovations. The Hingleys’ realtor had sold the house to another couple (from Ontario) in 2021, so she was able to reassure them that its bones were good. The Hingleys submitted a bid of $310,000—slightly below asking—on the same day as their viewing, pending a home inspection. When it revealed a leaky basement, they were able to knock another $10,000 off the price. The sellers agreed to the discount and a June 2022 possession date.

The Hingleys were able to offload their Courtenay property for a tidy $750,000 and a May closing. With weeks to kill until their New Brunswick move-in date, they decided to embark on a 40-day cross-Canada trip with Asher and Ember. (Aside from some minor mishaps, like out-of-order bathroom facilities at remote Yoho National Park, Billie Jean says the trip was memorable in a good way.) Upon arrival in New Brunswick, Billie Jean says the couple felt overwhelmingly validated in their decision to uproot their young children for a life yet-unseen. A friendly neighbour had been diligently collecting their mail, which had been piling up for weeks; another gave the Hingleys carte blanche to pick vegetables from their garden whenever they wanted. 

Real life resumed quickly: Billie Jean landed work as a home-care nurse in Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, and K.C. got to work on his sound studio, wrapping renovations last November. (When he’s not working away on production projects, he works as an administrator in Mount Allison University’s department of music.) As for the kids, Asher currently attends kindergarten at a school located an 11-minute drive from the Hingley home. And Ember’s new daycare, also 11 minutes away by car, costs mom and dad a wallet-friendly $325 a month. With the savings, Billie Jean says they’ve been able to enroll the kids in basketball and dance classes, which would have been well outside their budget in B.C.

The Hingleys miss their relatives back home, but they’re slowly building a new, extended social network out east. They’ve started lending out their abundance of ground-floor bedrooms to participants of Workaway, a home-stay program that offers free lodging and food in exchange for work. Recently, a woman from France pitched in with cooking and childcare. And in May, the Hingleys will host a family from Switzerland, who will help them build a backyard path to K.C.’s studio. With more than enough breathing room for their own family, they’re now welcoming others.

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The post The Move: Two working parents trek from B.C. to N.B. in search of affordable childcare appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photography by Grant Harder)

Real Estate Reformers

No.1: Mindy Wight and Khelsilem

READ: The Power List: Real Estate top 10

Last fall, Squamish First Nation broke ground on Sen’ák¯w, a massive, years-in-the-making housing development at the south end of Vancouver’s Burrard Bridge, on 10-plus acres of Squamish land. The project represented the largest economic partnership between a First Nation and the federal government in history, with the feds providing a $1.4-billion CMHC loan­—also the largest ever. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Housing Minister Ahmed Hussen were both at the ceremony, of course, but they were accompanied by two local officials: Khelsilem, chairperson of the Squamish Nation Council and, off-camera, Mindy Wight, the CEO of Nch´k¯ay’, the Nation’s business development arm. If Trudeau and Hussen embody the economic clout of the Canadian government, Khelsilem and Wight, young and ambitious, are poised to endow the Squamish people with unprecedented wealth and influence. They represent the new faces of Indigenous power.

MORE: See who made the 2023 Maclean’s Power List

The duo have been making political and economic waves for years. In 2017, at 29, Khelsilem was the youngest councillor to be elected to the Squamish Nation Council and appointed as one of two official spokespeople. Openly queer, and as comfortable in a voguing class as he is at a news conference, he quickly became renowned for his incisive anti-pipeline and housing activism and his strenuous efforts to preserve the Squamish language. Wight, who’s 41, grew up off-reserve in Prince George and trained as a chartered accountant. As a partner at MNP for almost five years, she ran the accounting firm’s national Indigenous tax services, working on governance and structuring with communities across the country. Wight wanted to give back to her own nation, so she joined Nch´k¯ay’’s board in 2019, then became CFO in 2021­ and permanent CEO last fall. When Squamish Nation Council brought on Westbank—the firm behind Vancouver House and Toronto’s Mirvish Village—as a development partner on Sen’akw, Wight’s leadership was instrumental. Last year, Wight tapped former B.C. Housing CEO Shayne Ramsay to help expand the organization’s real estate portfolio.

Nch´k¯ay’ has already bankrolled several successful businesses across the Lower Mainland: a pair of marinas, an RV park and a gas bar. Sen’ák¯w, though, is on another level of complexity, size and potential political transformation. When complete, it will include 11 rental apartment towers (housing up to 10,000 people), plus a new public transit station, childcare space, thousands of bike parking spots, 50,000 square feet of park and recreation facilities and—vital for a region in agonizing need of affordable housing—1,200 units below market rates. Squamish Nation members and businesses will be given priority.

Do you know the history of Sen̓áḵw? Let's take a walk back in time.

Long before the arrival of European settlers, Sen̓áḵw was a @SquamishNation village on the shores of what is known today as Kitsilano.

Sen̓áḵw was bountiful with fish, elk, cedar, and many more resources. pic.twitter.com/3FFMqQpzy8

— Nch’ḵaỷ Development Corporation (@nchkaycorp) March 10, 2023

Because Sen’ák¯w is being built on reserve land, it’s also legally free from the regulations and permits required of other developers; it will be bigger, and far denser, than most other housing complexes in the city centre. The entire project is estimated to cost $3 billion, and Westbank will split all future revenue with the Squamish Nation, which hopes to make between $8 billion and $10 billion over the project’s lifespan. Much of that money has been earmarked to provide secure, affordable housing and other social services for Nation members in other parts of the province.

For Khelsilem, Wight and other members of the Squamish Nation, Sen’ák¯w represents a new future—one in which reconciliation is as much about genuine financial reparations as it is about moral reckoning. Centuries ago, this wedge of waterfront land was a Squamish summer village and trading hot spot, its waters rich with fish and its red-cedar forests patrolled by elk. When Vancouver was founded in the late 19th century, however, the territory was reduced to a reserve—and then even that was taken away. Provincial government officials burned the village in 1913, and families were banished to neighbouring nations. In 2003, after decades of court battles, the Federal Court of Canada finally returned a small portion of that land, upon which Sen’ák¯w is now being built. The fish and elk are long gone, but the land itself has become—thanks to Vancouver’s overheated housing market—almost priceless. And thanks in part to Khelsilem and Wight, the Squamish people will be able to return to live and work where their ancestors once did.

Sen’ák¯w is a homecoming—and it’s just the beginning. Other First Nations are sitting on goldmines, too. In 2014, Squamish Nation, Musqueam Nation, and Tsleil-Waututh Nation signed an agreement to co-operate on land acquisitions and partnerships. Their for-profit real estate arm, MST Development, now owns six properties in the Metro Vancouver area, totalling 160 acres and worth $5 billion. Much of this land is already under development, promising yet more affordable housing, new transit and even a proposed film studio. Sen’ák¯w might look very different than it did before settlers took over, but soon enough, the city around it might look very much like Sen’ák¯w.

Check out the full 2023 Power List here

This article appears in print in the March 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post The Power List: Mindy Wight and Khelsilem are pairing real estate with reconciliation appeared first on Macleans.ca.

These are the Canadians working to “build back better.” Check out the full 2023 Power List here.

MORE: See who made the 2023 Maclean’s Power List

1. Mindy Wight and Khelsilem are pairing real estate with reconciliation

CEO Nch’ḵay̓ Development Corporation; Chairperson Squamish Nation Council

(Photography by Grant Harder)

Click here to find out why Wight and Khelsilem get the top spot

2. Stephen Sidwell is building an empire (from a low-carbon concrete dupe)

CEO, Nexii building solutions

From the vegan meat substitute Gardein to the healthy fast-casual restaurant chain Lyfe Kitchen, serial entrepreneur Stephen Sidwell has long had his finger in various planet-protecting pies. In 2019, he brought that expertise to construction: he teamed up with Saskatchewan-based brothers Michael and Ben Dombowsky, inventors of Nexiite, a proprietary sand-and-water-based, low-carbon alternative to concrete. Last year, their company was valued at $2 billion, and Nexiite panels were used to construct Marriott hotels, Scotiabank branches and even homes in fire-ravaged Lytton, British Columbia. Gregor Robertson, a former Vancouver mayor, serves as VP of strategy and partnerships, and even actor Michael Keaton is a fan; he’s partnered with Nexii to bring one of their plants to his hometown of Pittsburgh. Holy sustainability, Batman!

3. Robert Niven’s climate-tech company has impressed Bezos and Gates

Founder & CEO, CarbonCure

Since 2012, the Halifax firm CarbonCure has set its emissions-cutting sights on the cement industry, which produces about eight per cent (and rising) of the world’s greenhouse gases. Here’s how CarbonCure works: the company’s ingenious technology captures carbon dioxide from a variety of industrial sources, then injects it into fresh concrete, forever trapping the carbon—and simultaneously improving the concrete’s strength.

How do our technologies generate high-quality carbon credits? We’re transforming concrete into a #Climate solution. Every drop poured can be used to permanently store CO₂, helping the world reach its climate goals.

Contact us today to learn more about our #CarbonRemoval tech. pic.twitter.com/R4ULQeOQcF

— CarbonCure Technologies (@CarbonCure) July 14, 2022

Under the leadership of founder and CEO Robert Niven, CarbonCure has received investment from Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and, so far, has prevented almost 250,000 metric tonnes of CO₂ from entering the atmosphere. (For context, an average gas-fuelled car emits about five metric tonnes yearly.) By 2030, Niven and Co. hope to reduce those emissions by 500 million tonnes on an annual basis.

4. Cecilia Williams is developing Canada’s urban epicentres

Executive Vice-President & CFO, Allied Properties

Earlier this year, Allied Properties’ founder and CEO, Michael Emory, stepped aside and long-time CFO Cecilia Williams took over. She has her work cut out for her. High interest rates and the shift to hybrid work have been hard on the REIT, whose countrywide portfolio includes hundreds of low-rise historic buildings lovingly converted into prime office space. A planned move to sell off the company’s three Toronto data centres will replenish its coffers, however, and Allied’s power to shape the urban core of Canada’s major cities remains unmatched. The Well, a massive mixed-use Toronto development Allied co-owns with RioCan, is now open and bustling. And in 2022, the company acquired six new commercial properties, one of which is an office tower on Vancouver’s West Georgia Street, the largest real estate deal in the city’s downtown that year.

5. Alan Greenberg is funding real estate’s green future

Co-founder, Greensoil Investments

Alan Greenberg is Toronto real estate royalty, with almost 30 years under his belt at the family business. (You may know the condo and rental-apartment developer the Minto Group.) At Minto, Greenberg formed the Minto Green Team, which is focused on making the company more energy-efficient and all-around eco-friendly. After retiring at 50, Greenberg carried that same sustainability-boosting impulse into his next venture: Greensoil Investments, a venture capital firm that’s devoted $100 million to bankrolling cutting-edge, zero-carbon real estate and agricultural projects across North America—and as far afield as Europe and Israel. Greensoil’s portfolio includes Ivy Energy (a solar-energy billing platform), smart-sensor firm Wynd and CarbonCure—another notable company you may have just heard of.

6. Michael Cooper is reviving Toronto’s smart-city dreams

Chair, Quayside Impact Limited Partnership

Remember Sidewalk Toronto, Google’s proposed smart-city project in Toronto’s east end? Thanks to Michael Cooper, president of real estate developer Dream Unlimited, that epic fail will soon be nothing more than a best-forgotten nightmare. Cooper is now shepherding the Quayside Project, an all-electric, zero-carbon, car-free, mixed-use development at the nexus point of Parliament Street and Lake Shore Boulevard. The blueprint for the eight-acre community includes 4,300 residential units (800 of which are designated affordable), a two-acre “community forest,” a rooftop urban farm and a brand-new performing arts centre. Lending the project even more credibility, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation have come aboard as a partner, joining Crow’s Theatre and the Bentway.

7. Carol Phillips is imagining bigger, better Canadian buildings

Partner, Moriyama & Teshima architects

As far as the Canadian construction industry is concerned, mass timber has been the greatest, greenest thing going for years now. One project in particular promises to be the biggest and most Canadian: Limberlost Place, a startlingly ambitious 10-storey building at George Brown College in Toronto’s east end. Scheduled to open in 2025, Limberlost will be the largest mass-timber structure in the country, its wood sourced from northern Quebec and its designers based in B.C. and Ontario.

Check out this collection of photos recently captured of the Limberlost Place construction site at George Brown College’s waterfront campus in Toronto’s East Bayfront community! #moriyamateshima #limberlostplace #masstimber #architecture #canadianarchitecture pic.twitter.com/83sLkX1f1p

— Moriyama Teshima Architects (@moriyamateshima) March 14, 2023

Architect Carol Phillips, of Moriyama & Teshima, is the partner in charge of the project, bringing to it the groundbreaking design techniques and keen aesthetic eye she’s displayed at the award-winning University of Toronto Multi-Faith Centre and the new Parliament Hill Visitor Welcome Centre in the nation’s capital.

8. Courtney Cooper is Canadian proptech’s prime mover

Principal, Alate Partners

Virtual open houses. Sophisticated property-management software. It’s all part of proptech, or property technology, a field that’s exploded recently. In 2021, the global proptech market was valued at US$25 billion, and it’s expected to grow by almost 16 per cent per year through 2030. No Canadian is a bigger proptech booster than Courtney Cooper. As a principal at Toronto’s Alate Partners, she leads investments in proptech companies. And as co-founder of Proptech Collective—a group of similarly tech-savvy entrepreneurs, brokers and city-builders—Cooper’s been instrumental in dragging Canadian real estate into the 21st century. The industry continues to grapple with thorny issues (affordability; a stubbornly persistent pandemic), but Cooper speaks in solutions: more transparent data, collaboration and inclusivity.

9. Ian Arthur is printing solutions to the housing crisis

Co-founder, Nidus3d

Ian Arthur has one of the more eclectic CVs you’ll encounter: in his youth, he was head chef at the famed Chez Piggy restaurant in Kingston, Ontario, and between 2018 and 2022, he was an MPP for the Ontario NDP. During his tenure, Arthur served on the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs, where he learned firsthand about his constituents’ housing struggles. In 2021, Arthur pivoted yet again, co-founding Nidus3D, a startup specializing in the affordable—and quick!—3D printing of construction materials.

As Canada’s first residentially permitted multi-resident 3D-printed building, the Leamington project serves as proof of concept and paves the path for quicker and more cost-effective homes for Canadian families pic.twitter.com/qjpxnlJDdh

— nidus3D (@nidus3D) February 27, 2023

Its first project is also the first fully 3D-printed concrete residential structure in Canada: a fourplex, produced in partnership with Habitat for Humanity, which went up in Leamington, Ontario, last fall. Nidus3D is currently at work on larger and more complex buildings—including a two-storey studio—all across North America. Print it, and they will come.

10. Oliver Lang is speeding up Canada’s construction

Co-founder & CEO, Intelligent City

Given the global construction industry’s massive pollution—it accounted for 37 per cent of energy and process-related CO₂ emissions in 2021—its sluggish moves toward sustainability have been maddening. Oliver Lang, head of Vancouver-based housing tech company Intelligent City, is changing that. Intelligent City fuses old-school materials (wood, in the form of mass timber) with cutting-edge technology (like robotics) to produce a scalable, cheaper process of prefab construction. Several of its surprisingly attractive homes now dot B.C.’s Lower Mainland, and an 18-storey apartment building is currently in the rezoning stage. While the company’s been around for 15 years, it’s benefiting from a boost of VC cash and evolving building codes, not to mention a second manufacturing plant planned for Ontario. It seems the industry might finally be catching up.

Check out the full 2023 Power List here

This article appears in print in the March 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post The Power List: Top 10 Real Estate Reformers appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photos courtesy Mint Content/Lloyoll)

Ian Urbina, a longtime New York Times reporter, spent 17 years abroad reporting on human rights and the environment in Cuba, Mexico and Spain, but his travels rarely brought him to Canada. Before last year, Urbina’s only link to the Great White North was a colleague who couldn’t stop musing about his summer property on Prince Edward Island. Urbina was based in Washington, D.C., but he was enraptured by his co-worker’s tales. “He would tell me about this magical island with miles of beaches that his kids loved,” Urbina says.

By 2022, Urbina had left the Times to found The Outlaw Ocean, a non-profit organization that produces investigative journalism about human rights, labour and environmental concerns at sea. He longed for a peaceful place near a body of water to think and work, and P.E.I.’s North Shore—battered in September by Hurricane Fiona but normally quiet and serene—appeared to fit the bill. So he gave into his curiosity and, despite never having set foot on the island, started shopping online for properties.

He found a 10-acre piece of land on the water near the eastern hamlet of Naufrage. From his research on Google Maps, he could tell the area would be quiet—a two-kilometre-long driveway separated his plot from the island’s network of paved roads that extended for 75 kilometres before reaching Charlottetown. The privacy appealed to him so much that he bought the land sight unseen, with plans to build a vacation home. 

Urbina needed a contractor who could build something modern and compact with a view of the ocean. He was a carpenter in his younger days and, armed with his craftsmanship and aesthetic preferences, he found his match in Lloyoll, a Nova Scotia–based construction and design firm that specializes in minimalistic fortresses made mostly of wood and glass. Urbina chose the Skali High Cuboid model: a two-bedroom, 768-square-foot glass and weathering steel box with 11-foot cedar ceilings and sprawling windows, all for a base price of $345,000. He loved how the home’s copper-coloured façade matched the earth. “It melded perfectly with the surrounding soil because of its reddish colour, and stood out starkly from the shoreline because of its futuristic shape,” says Urbina.

The developers transported the box to Urbina’s lot in early December, and he visited the province for the first time three days later. He was taken aback by the frigid temperature: five below with a brisk breeze. “The winter had not even really started, but it was cold like nothing I had experienced. The wind on that North Shore was no joke,” he says. But his early brush with Maritime weather did little to dampen his enthusiasm about his new place, which came winter-proof and fitted with a wood-burning fireplace, an air-source heat pump and electric heaters behind the cabinetry—all wrapped in high-density insulation. 

Urbina loves the thoughtful details that went into his new house. The windows and doors are custom designed, the Douglas fir panels are made by Lloyoll, and the black and copper fixtures give the place a Scandinavian look. The home is also highly functional: the kitchen comes with Bosch appliances, the bathrooms have heated floors and spotlights line the cabinetry to make the place glow at night. The building’s outer skeleton of hardwood, glass and stone is not equipped to support a television, so the developers built Urbina a hideaway stand that folds down from the ceiling. 

Last summer was Urbina’s first on P.E.I. He marvelled at the island’s resounding calm, the quaintness of Charlottetown and sunsets unencumbered by city lights. “What captivated me most was how few people there are,” he said. “It creates a deep quiet that makes it so easy to write and relax.” 

His next trip to Canada from D.C. will be in April, when he will show off his new home to a few of his friends. Around that time, he plans to build a back deck and prepare the place for summer getaways with his wife, son, step-daughter and grandson. “I think I lucked out: first by choosing P.E.I. as a place to build, and second by picking the perfect contractor,” Urbina says. “I feel like I won the lottery twice.”

The post Habitat: A former New York Times journalist built this beachside fortress in P.E.I. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Photos courtesy Sotheby’s/Ross Halloran)

Just a stone’s throw across Lake Simcoe from Victoria Point and the town of Orillia lies Grape Island, home to roughly 40 cottage properties—including this secluded, water-access getaway, which is on the market for $1.89 million. 

Located just 90 minutes from  Toronto—including the three minutes from dock to dock crossing Simcoe from Orillia’s Victoria Point—the property is a rare double lot dotted with shipping containers that have been turned into three cozy sleeping quarters. There’s also a modern, custom-designed, two-storey lake house, plus the main home.

Imported Malaysian hardwood walkways connect the five buildings, including this children’s bunkie and a laundry and gym building nestled on the back of the property under the shady treeline. 

The property’s unusual design is inspired by the owner’s travels to the Caribbean. There are ready-to-lounge-on daybeds on walk-out patio decks, a western red cedar barrel sauna from Northern Lights Cedar Tubs and Saunas in Winnipeg that fits six, and a sleek and elegant outdoor concrete-topped Acadia wood-legged dining table from Seven Continents in Manhattan that seats a dozen people next to two outdoor fire pits. 

What else does the $1,895,000 price tag come with? Five bedrooms, four bathrooms, 3,000 total square feet, 200 feet of unobstructed waterfront views and all the trappings of a refined summer home: screened-in porch in the main dwelling, custom-built touch cabinets, sliding glass doors and a deep, square, white cedar Japanese soaker tub in the main bathroom.

A safari-inspired glamping tent custom-built on-site comes with an open-air standing shower.

If having a roof is more your speed, the boathouse offers a loft-style sleeping space with a full bathroom and unparalleled morning panoramas.

A retractable dock and vessel storage comes with the property, so owning a boat is a must to get the most out of this island home. Have multiple family members or friends en route for the weekend? Several residents operate a water taxi to ferry additional guests and residents back and forth (or “scoots,” hovercraft-like vehicles that navigate through the channel in inclement winter weather).

You can’t drive on the island. A walking path provides access to a shared public dock and connects residential property lines. Some owners have lived full time on Grape Island since the ’50s, so you’d be joining a close-knit community.

The post For $1.9 million you can buy a luxury container compound in Ontario appeared first on Macleans.ca.

After three pandemic-plagued years, Canadians have emerged, squinting and disoriented, into a new world order. While we were baking sourdough in lockdown, artificial intelligence evolved from the stuff of movie magic into big business. Basketball and soccer closed in on hockey to join the ranks of Canada’s national games. We finally began taking climate change seriously, churning out electric vehicles by the thousands and building skyscrapers out of renewable timber. And the coolest place to film a prestige TV show was suddenly…Alberta?

Commanding this weird, cool, occasionally scary new reality is a cohort of Canadians whose ideas and inventions are forging new industries and reinventing old ones. We’ve selected the top 10 changemakers in 10 categories. There’s Kris Collins, a former hairdresser who entertains some 48 million Gen Zers with her bite-sized TikTok sketches. Mindy Wight and Khelsilem of the Squamish Nation are in charge of a revolutionary $3-billion housing development in Vancouver. And tech whiz Raquel Urtasun is teaching cars how to drive themselves. Some of the people on our list are already household names. The rest are about to be.

Skip to a section:

• Sports Stars
• Political Backroomers
• AI Trailblazers
• Real Estate Reformers
• Health Care Innovators
• Gaming Tycoons
• Hollywood North Stars
• Food Titans
• EV Entrepreneurs
• TikTok Influencers

The post The Power List 2023 appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Husmates co-founder Lesli Gaynor (photo courtesy Gaynor)

Since becoming a real estate agent in 2015, Lesli Gaynor has specialized in co-ownership. She sees it as a model of housing that addresses the problems of affordability, lack of density and social isolation. Co-purchasers are often family members or friends, but that doesn’t have to be the case. She and her business partner, Parimal Gosai, started talking about how they could help and, in 2021, they launched Husmates: a real estate platform that works like a dating app by matching buyers looking to purchase property together. Sharing a mortgage with a stranger may sound like a risky proposition, but Gaynor says it’s all about doing the right work in advance. Here, she talks about why it’s a good idea to keep kitchens and bathrooms separate and what happens if your co-owner lands their dream job in Timbuktu.

RELATED: My mortgage is about to go up by at least $1,000 a month

Husmates sounds like Tinder for real estate. Where did the idea come from?

Co-ownership is the reason I got into real estate. I purchased a property with two friends back in the ’90s and I saw a lot of potential in the model, both as a way for people to break into the market and as a force for positive social change. That’s been my focus since I became a real estate agent in 2015. I’ve been helping prospective owners co-purchase properties since then. In 2019, I met my business partner, Parimal. He was the listing agent on a deal I was doing and we got to talking and realized we were both passionate about co-ownership. During the pandemic, we kept getting calls from potential clients who wanted to co-purchase and had their finances in order, but didn’t have someone to buy with. Parimal and I started talking about how we could help these clients, and that’s when this idea of a real estate dating app came up. Tinder for real estate is our elevator pitch, but you shouldn’t meet someone online and jump into a purchase any more than you would go on one Tinder date and agree to get married.

How exactly do people match on Husmates? And what happens then?

You create a profile and fill in details about everything from your finances to your location preferences to your social life and diet. (If you’re vegan, you probably don’t want to be with someone who barbecues every weekend.) Currently we have about 450 users on the app, which is focused on properties in Toronto and the GTHA. A match is when you “like” someone’s profile for any reason: maybe you’re both based in the area where you’re looking to purchase, or maybe you might both love dogs. It’s not always two people: we sometimes have groups of three or more who connect on the app. If parties are interested in meeting, they can do that with our help or arrange it on their own. After that initial match, the hard work starts to make sure everyone is on the same page and, if it gets to that point, to create the terms of an agreement: What happens if I want to exit? How will we value the property? Who will we use for mediation if we hit a snag? These are the conversations that anyone buying real estate together should be having—whether it’s with a spouse, a friend, a family member—but they often don’t. We have a lawyer to help draft those agreements.

READ: The Move: From Toronto’s rental grind to a quaint corner store in Quebec

Do you discuss common pressure points like playing loud music, parties, pets, smoking weed indoors?

That’s what we refer to as the culture of the house, and those questions definitely come up. At the same time, these issues aren’t unique to co-ownership. If you live in a condo or rent in a multi-unit property, you’re going to have to follow some rules. Co-ownership also doesn’t necessarily mean cohabitation. For the most part, we advocate for hybrid spaces where you have separate living spaces with maybe a shared backyard or living room. We had two families co-purchase a detached three-storey home with two separate units in the west end of Toronto, and they left a finished basement as a shared social space. I matched two women in a single home outside the city, and now they’re renovating to create two separate units. I recently started working with a group of four women in their 60s who met on Husmates. They all own their own homes, but they’re starting to have conversations about aging in place and how they might be able to do that together in one property.

So you don’t get a lot of people wanting to co-own a single home?

We’ve had some people looking into that, but our advice is “Don’t do it.” Shared spaces are hard. Sharing kitchens and bathrooms are especially hard, even with people you love. You end up having conflicts because one person thinks the kitchen should be spotless and the other piles dishes in the sink.

MORE: The Move: Why two pilots willing to put down roots anywhere in Canada landed in Calgary

Ontario’s Bill 23, a provincial act that loosens existing rules to allow for more residential development, will make it easier to get approval for laneway homes, auxiliary apartments and multi-unit properties. What will that do for co-ownership?

We worked with a client who bought a larger lot with a single home so he could build a laneway home and live in it, while the original owners lived in the main house. We’re seeing more interest in that kind of set-up. I have other issues with Bill 23 because it favours developers—if it costs $350 a square foot to develop a laneway home, that’s not going to be affordable for most people. We need to get creative about how these things can be financed. One idea is that we have separate mortgages on the same property or we mortgage pre-construction.

What about people who are interested in co-purchasing an investment property?

We aren’t in the business of turning clients away, but investment properties aren’t our focus. Co-ownership is a way for people to buy property in an increasingly unaffordable housing market, but it’s also a socially progressive approach to real estate. Before I became a real estate agent, I was a social worker focused on health policy. I know how important it is to have secure housing. I’m not saying co-ownership is going to solve our housing crisis—you have to have money to co-own. But I do think it’s a way to address a number of social concerns: isolation has been a big issue since the pandemic, and we can build neighbourhoods the way they were meant to be built, so both elderly and young people are part of a community. White picket fences were ideal at one point, but they have a way of keeping people apart.

It seems no one can afford to buy property anymore, at least in Toronto. Is there a specific demographic you’re dealing with?

With the Husmates app, it’s mostly millennials—people in their 30s who are starting to realize that this may be their only way into the market. So maybe there will be two or three people buying property together or just two co-owners along with a silent investor, a.k.a Mom or Dad. I’ve had scenarios with three buyers who are going to live in the property, and then you have a fourth silent investor—someone’s parents—putting down a big chunk of the down payment. In that case, we set up an equalization agreement, so that the silent party is eventually paid out. It’s not complicated, but if you don’t have those terms in place, it can be a nightmare.

What are some other common pitfalls you can avoid via the right paperwork?

We’ve had cases where two people co-purchase a home and then one of them gets into a relationship and their partner moves in. If you live in separate units, that’s not a problem, except when you’re dealing with a matrimonial property situation where the new partner can claim ownership. Maybe both buyers are single when I meet them, but thinking about the future is my job. What if one person gets their dream job in Timbuktu that starts tomorrow? When both parties sign a document stipulating what happens in different circumstances before buying property together, it’s less hassle for everyone involved.

What happens if your co-owner moves to Timbuktu?

You would decide in advance who pays the penalties if the mortgage is broken. Sharing a mortgage is probably the biggest pressure point in co-ownership: you’re going into debt with another person, and both of you are equally responsible. You may have paid your share, but if the full mortgage payment isn’t in on the due date, the bank doesn’t care who owes it. I always advise people to have employment insurance and also a slush fund that covers three months of payments. We call it the anti-tsunami clause.

Have you ever met with prospective co-owners and told them they were not a good match?

Definitely. It’s happened a few times. It’s what you would think: one person is saying how much they appreciate the quiet, and the other person wants to make sure there’s enough room to host parties.

So there’s no “opposites attract” in co-ownership?

I think there can be, but that’s when you really want to make sure people have their own space.

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The post This realtor created a Tinder for property co-ownership appeared first on Macleans.ca.

(Illustration by Maclean’s)

For West Coasters, it’s hard to ignore the threat of the Big One—especially in Victoria, the city where I live, and which is probably at greater risk of major devastation due to an earthquake than any other Canadian city. Every time an earth-shaking tragedy happens somewhere else, that risk is brought into sharp relief, because we know one day it will happen here—and “one day” may not be that far into the future. 

READ: The Big Burn: How B.C. is learning to live with wildfires

A report commissioned by the city of Victoria in 2017 looked at different types of earthquakes that could shake the city, including two worst-case scenarios: an offshore, magnitude-9 subduction quake, or a magnitude-7 crustal quake, closer to the city. The first would be caused by the massive undersea fault stretching all the way from northern California to the north tip of Vancouver Island. Scientists know that it produces massive quakes every few hundred years. There are records in Indigenous oral history of a huge earthquake around the year 1700, as well as written records from Japan of an “orphan tsunami” that year, which suggest Cascadia last ripped open 323 years ago. Scientists estimate the Cascadia subduction zone produces a quake every 200 to 800 years, so we’re within the window, with an estimated 10 per cent chance during the next 50 years. Add to that the risk of other tremors, including a crustal quake, and there may be a one-in-three chance of the city being violently shaken in the next 50 years.

RELATED: An Edmonton couple refitted their home to be completely net zero

The city’s report painted a bleak picture of what would happen: hundreds of buildings could collapse, and thousands more would be damaged beyond repair. The study estimated the city could lose nearly two-thirds of its entire building stock in either kind of quake—a civic disaster unmatched in modern Canadian history.

I’ve long assumed that the odds of my old house being one of the survivors of a quake like this are slim. The 111-year-old wood frame house is long on charm but short on modern seismic innovations. So in 2018, I hired a seismic engineer. Graham Taylor is an expert in the field, who’s worked on British Columbia’s school seismic renovation efforts. (His predictions are as bleak as the province’s—he’s estimated up to 2,000 people in the Victoria area could be killed in a big quake.) Taylor inspected my walls, the basement, the ground beneath my house and a few other important factors, and confirmed my suspicions: my house wasn’t likely to make it. After a few minutes of side-to-side shaking, the nails in the old boards on my basement walls will probably work themselves loose, at which point the boards will fall off the vertical two-by-four wall studs that support the house on top of the concrete foundation. Once those boards fly off, it will only take a bit more shaking before the wall studs succumb to the horizontal motion and topple over sideways, bringing the top two floors crashing down on the basement. Anyone in the top two floors would probably not be crushed, but the house would be destroyed. 

Gregor Craigie has spent years preparing for an eventual earthquake (Photos courtesy Craigie)

On hearing that kind of news, Taylor says, some homeowners simply decide to leave. He’s seen some people move thousands of kilometres away—both because the thought of the earthquake terrified them, and due to the unsettling questions about what life would be like after the event, when food and shelter could be in extremely short supply. But I’ve got a job and a life here, so I decided I would make my house stronger.

READ: Why I’m suing the Ontario government over its climate change inaction

I had, in fact, already done a fair bit of work the year before I hired Taylor. I’d nailed steel reinforcement plates to the junctions between the vertical support posts and the horizontal ceiling beams in my basement—the beams simply rest on the posts, which has been fine during the past century, because the ground hasn’t moved, and the weight of an entire house on top keeps things firmly in place. In a big quake, though, basement posts often shake loose from the beams they’re supporting. I also bolted the hot water tank to the wall, so we wouldn’t have a flooded basement—and we have a big container full of clean water, even if all the water lines ruptured. I even screwed my bookshelves to the walls with steel L-brackets to make sure no one in my family got knocked out by our home library. 

But the basement walls were key to keeping the house standing. I could hire a contractor to do the work—but Taylor suggested I could do the work myself to save money. It’s expensive, time-consuming and laborious, but it’s pretty straightforward, too. Since my mortgage doesn’t pay itself and our grocery bill gets bigger monthly, I took a deep breath and got to work, beginning on the outside. 

The house was covered in old cedar shakes that needed replacing anyway, so I pried them off, then proceeded to pry off the old boards underneath, nailed sideways onto the vertical studs. I found a lot of spiders, mouse droppings and dust along the way, but following the relatively straightforward plans, I methodically nailed new, three-quarter inch plywood to the wall studs, where the old boards had been. The new plywood is far stronger, and the plans call for a lot more nails, in a specific nailing pattern. I also cut the plywood in half before nailing it to the wall, so it has a built-in break to absorb some of the side-to-side motion when the shaking starts. 

A lot of seismic retrofits like this also call for steel bolts, to attach the wood frame of the house to concrete foundations, but Taylor told me it wasn’t necessary, and would probably just give me a leaky basement because of potential holes and cracks in the old concrete. 

All of these engineering fixes are based on real-world observations of how wooden houses have responded to real earthquakes, in California and elsewhere. They’re also based on earthquake simulations, like those performed on the giant “shake table” earthquake simulator at the University of British Columbia. I visited the simulator once, with Taylor, and watched it shake a large plywood room, the size of a school classroom. It had giant steel plates resting on top of it, and the engineers had programmed the table to replicate the exact shaking pattern from the deadly 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan. When the plywood classroom shook for more than two minutes, the nails holding the plywood to the wall studs hardly moved. But similar simulations with walls like my basement—with narrower boards and fewer nails—showed the nails popping out under sustained shaking, eventually collapsing the walls.

That was a vivid reminder of what is not only possible, but eventually, guaranteed to hit my house—unless I finish the work in time. But after countless weekend hours of prying, measuring, cutting, and hammering away, I’m still only a quarter done. Life keeps getting in the way. First came the pandemic. Then the price of lumber tripled. There’s my regular job, my side gig writing a second book—my first one, about Canada’s under-recognized earthquake risk, was published in 2021—and family life. Taking a glance at the calendar on the fridge as I write this, I see all three kids are playing in a water polo tournament this weekend. So all in all, I’m about two years behind schedule. Realistically, I hope to finish the basement walls in the fall of 2024.

MORE: How 16-year-old Naila Moloo is making waves as an environmental innovator

And even then, the seismic retrofit won’t be done. After that I’ll have to figure out what to do with the two old chimneys, one on either side of the house, that could become a hail of deadly bricks in a big quake. It’s happened before that people run out of buildings which end up remaining standing, only to be killed by raining bricks. There’s a solid argument for getting rid of most, if not all, brick chimneys in a seismic zone, but mine still tower above my old house. Most of the other houses in my neighbourhood have similar chimneys, and one day, some of them will surely come tumbling down.

I’m not happy to be behind schedule, but I’m trying to go easy on myself. After all, there are a lot of other things to worry about in life, and money and time are hard to come by. Maybe that’s why so many thousands of buildings in Victoria, Vancouver and beyond are still as vulnerable as my house—including plenty of publicly owned buildings. Half of British Columbia’s vulnerable public schools, for example, have been given seismic retrofits, at a cost of more than $2 billion—but that also means half have not. 

And while the chances of a catastrophic earthquake in our lifetime are highest on the West Coast, this isn’t the only part of the country at risk. Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City all lie in seismic zones that have produced major events in the past. They’re full of older, unreinforced masonry and wood-framed buildings, and newer buildings are no better off, since they’re not constructed in those areas with seismic risk in mind. The east coast isn’t entirely safe either; the ocean floor off Newfoundland could rumble once again like it did in 1929, when it triggered the deadly Burin Peninsula tsunami, which devastated fishing villages in that province, and claimed 28 lives. The truth is that the clock keeps ticking for many Canadian communities—and millions of us who live in active seismic zones had better hope we still have enough time to get ready.

The post I’ve spent six years earthquake-proofing my house in anticipation of B.C.’s Big One appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The buyers:

Tatjana Heuer-Carrigan, 31, and Hamza Tariq, 37

The budget:

$1.5 million 

The backstory:

Throughout his late teens and early 20s, Hamza worked part time at his father’s corner stores, first in Kingston, Ontario, then in Winnipeg. He didn’t mind the work, which included stocking shelves, paperwork and manning the counter—he just couldn’t imagine making a life of it. After finishing his undergraduate degree at the University of Winnipeg, Hamza moved to Toronto, where, three years ago, he met Tatjana on Tinder. It was a whirlwind romance, and the couple married after less than a year of dating. At that point, they both had steady jobs in marketing—him for American Express, her for the Toronto Star—and they were thinking about buying a home together. 

READ: The Move: Why two pilots willing to put down roots anywhere in Canada landed in Calgary

To save money, the couple moved in with Hamza’s parents, who were then living in a four-bedroom home in Brampton. Hamza and Tatjana were grateful for the helping hand, but space was tight: Hamza’s sister and brother-in-law were also crashing at the house, and Hamza’s brother often stayed over. In early 2021, after six months of cohabiting in cramped quarters, the couple started looking for their dream property.  House prices had skyrocketed during the pandemic, which limited their options. But Hamza and Tatjana weren’t interested in a starter home. They wanted a place with several bedrooms—they were planning for kids—as well as office space. A $1.5-million budget wouldn’t stretch far in Toronto, so they focused their search on Etobicoke, Oakville and Mississauga. They visited roughly 30 properties in their price range, all small townhouses and semi-detached properties that needed extensive aesthetic or structural upgrades. None appealed to them, and they called off their search without ever entering a bid.

In May of 2021, Hamza and Tatjana decided to sign a year-long lease on a two-bedroom condo in Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood and wait for house prices to settle. “Seeing what we could afford made us feel so discouraged,” says Tatjana. “We also started to think that our corporate lives in Toronto weren’t going to allow us the work-life balance we wanted. The ability to  spend more time at home with a child or two was important to me.” Conversations with Hamza’s parents further expanded their thinking. The Tariqs’ corner-store business brought in more money than Hamza and Tatjana’s salaries combined—plus they set their own hours. Hamza, now a long way from his part-time days at his father’s shops, realized that buying their own store might be the solution he and Tatjana were looking for. 

The hunt:

The couple resumed their real estate search, this time in Quebec, where Tatjana was born. There, they could buy a corner store—known as a dépanneur, or “dep,” in La Belle Province—for a third of the price of an Ontario store. Job security was another upside: independent dépanneurs are fixtures of Québécois culture and occupy a solid niche in a market saturated with bigger convenience chains. Tatjana was also excited by the idea of returning to the province of her birth. “Even though I grew up in Vancouver,” she says, “I felt connected to Quebec. I often visited my dad’s family in Montreal.”

RELATED: The Move: This Ontario family found space and affordability in Calgary

Over a series of weekends in the late winter and early spring of 2022, Hamza drove thousands of kilometres to scope out dozens of existing businesses for sale across southern and central Quebec. Sometimes Tatjana came with; other times, his parents came along for the ride. The couple came close to closing on a dépanneur located in Sherbrooke, but ultimately decided it was too big (and busy) a site for their first venture. It was on a solo trip a 90-minute drive northeast of Montreal that Hamza found “the one”: Dépanneur Joblo, in the 2,400-person town of Maskinongé. Joblo was previously owned by a couple in their 60s, and the business was already profitable. It sold convenience-store mainstays like chips, chocolate, milk, bread, beer and cigarettes, and even had its own coffee counter. In Maskinongé, whose entire commercial centre consisted of a gas station, a pharmacy, a gym and a bank, the dep was an established hub.

The 130-year-old building sat on just under an acre of land, next to a Catholic church and across from the Maskinongé River. Along with the main-floor store came two second-floor apartments. Hamza and Tatjana knew right away that they would move into the larger, three-bedroom space and set up the other one for visiting family and friends. Best of all, they could get the entire 2,400-square-foot complex for $450,000—less than a third of their Toronto budget. “It added up in so many ways,” says Hamza. “Plus, Maskinongé is halfway between Montreal and Quebec City, so we had easy access to big cities.” They were sold.

Hamza and Tatjana were initially a bit worried about what their neighbours would think of them. For starters, neither spoke French. Tatjana had taken classes in school but was far from being able to communicate at workplace-level fluency. They also had concerns about what it would be like for Hamza—who immigrated from Pakistan as a child—to be a brown, non-French-speaking person in a small, white town, a wildly different reality from Toronto. Determined to steer public opinion in their favour, the couple went on a charm offensive. Last July, a week or so after they moved in, they threw a “get to know us” party, setting up a tent in the dep’s parking lot and passing out donuts, muffins and coffee. They even printed 100 T-shirts emblazoned with “J’ai choisi Maski” (“I chose Maski”), a heart and a fleur-de-lis on the front, and “Dépanneur Joblo” on the back. “It was the talk of the town,” Hamza says. “People came into the store afterwards asking if we had any more shirts.”

MORE: The Move: Why one family left Toronto for Vancouver Island… and 14 goats

Settling into their new living quarters didn’t go quite as smoothly. After renting a modern condo in Toronto, life in an old building took some getting used to. The floors weren’t level and the apartment rattled with each passing train. Joblo’s previous owners were heavy smokers, which meant replacing all the light fixtures and window treatments, and washing the walls multiple times. In the end, the couple hired a local guy to repaint the interior, twice. Banishing the smoky smell cost them upwards of $5,000. Still, Hamza and Tatjana loved being able to spread out across 1,300 square feet in their unit, a pleasure after being cooped up first in a condo, and then with family. And there was no denying the convenience of living right above their new workplace.

Finding their groove as store owners took time, though. Before putting down an offer on Joblo’s, Hamza and Tatjana had decided not to make any immediate changes to the dep itself. They wanted the staff to feel as comfortable as possible before switching things up, especially given the language barrier. Tatjana’s grandmother—who speaks French—came to stay for a few days to help them get acclimated. “There’s only so much we can do with Google Translate,” says Tatjana. Shortly after, Hamza’s dad sent one of his bilingual employees from Ontario to spend three weeks at Joblo.

Despite Hamza and Tatjana’s best efforts, three of Joblo’s four existing staff members quit within two months of their arrival. Finding replacements during a labour shortage was difficult, but the dep was back up to three employees by December and by that point, everyone was gelling. Tatjana now deals with the dep’s day-to-day operations (like customer service and stock) while Hamza tends to back-end tasks (like accounting). In February, Joblo expanded its small coffee counter into a more elaborate takeout service called Chez Mama Sam, complete with a menu of South Asian dishes developed by Hamza’s mom (plus poutine). “At no point did I imagine we’d be living in the middle of Quebec, and that my mom would be teaching a cook named Steve how to make Pakistani food,” says Hamza, laughing. “Actually, he’s the brother of the guy who repainted our place. It really is a small town!”

Despite the initial challenges, Tatjana and Hamza’s gamble has paid off. They’re already looking to buy a second dep in the area and planning to rebrand their properties from gas station–style pit stops to a more “general store” feel. The couple also adopted an English cocker spaniel puppy named Monty, with whom they take long walks on the trails of Pointe-Yamachiche nature reserve. For now, at least, the quiet life in Quebec suits them. “I love that there’s no traffic here,” Hamza says. “And there are only ever six people at the gym.”

This article contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.

The post The Move: From Toronto’s rental grind to a quaint corner store in Quebec appeared first on Macleans.ca.

There are approximately 400 wineries in B.C., many of them concentrated in the Okanagan Valley—and one of them is currently on the market.

Priced at just under $10 million, this nearly 10-acre property comes with a modern five-bedroom residence and an operational 6.5-acre vineyard capable of producing 15 tons of wine each year. 

The owners, a Calgary couple, had always loved visiting Okanagan and dreamed of having their own vineyard there. In 2007, they bought a tract of hillside near the village of Naramata, situated on the eastern shore of Okanagan Lake. They commissioned Robert Mackenzie, a local architect who specializes in wineries, to build them a summer home on the property. In 2011, construction was completed. After 12 years, the owners plan to spend more time in their Calgary hometown, so they’re bidding farewell to their vineyard estate. 

To compensate for strong winds on the hillside, the two-storey home was built with a durable exposed steel frame, concrete and rough-cut natural stone. To accent those materials, locally sourced veneer panelling and reclaimed timber were also used during construction. 

Mackenzie emphasized extreme angular shapes in his designs, including the massive triangular roof. Its largest portion juts out over the living area, which has 20-foot floor-to-ceiling windows. 

The home was designed with sustainability in mind: the owners installed solar panelling and a geothermal system that efficiently provides radiant heating as well as air-conditioning while maintaining a minimal carbon footprint. 

On the first level, you can find the master bedroom, two guest bedrooms and a wine cellar. Upstairs, there’s an added guest room, as well as that main living space. In the back, there’s a patio with an infinity pool overlooking the lake.  

Maintained by a local management company, the vineyard is capable of yielding 15 tons of Cabernet Franc, Gewürztraminer, Merlot, and Pinot Gris annually. The harvest is sold to two local wineries. 

The property backs onto the Kettle Valley Rail Trail, which offers both biking and hiking routes on a continuous 650-kilometre stretch of decommissioned railway that extends from Hope to Castlegar. The lake is great for rainbow trout and kokanee salmon fishing enthusiasts, and the Naramata Marina is only a nine-minute drive away. And, of course, there’s also wineries aplenty nearby.

The post For $9.9 million you can buy this B.C. estate that comes with its own vineyard appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The buyers:

Sylvie Bouffard, a 25-year-old regional-airline pilot, and Riley Dewar, a 27-year-old corporate-jet pilot.

The budget:

$500,000

The backstory:

Sylvie and Riley are originally from opposite sides of the country—her from Ottawa and him from Squamish, British Columbia. In 2020, they met somewhere close to the middle, while working as air-ambulance pilots in La Ronge, a remote community in northern Saskatchewan. They were used to airlifting victims of ATV and snowmobile accidents to hospitals, but during the pandemic, they serviced more and more patients afflicted with COVID. “It was nice to be in the same field at that time,” Sylvie says. “When we needed to rant after a long day, we each had someone who could understand us.”

RELATED: The Move: This Ontario family found space and affordability in Calgary

In November of 2020, the couple moved in together, renting a three-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot house in La Ronge for $1,200 a month. It was an older property, but it had a large porch overlooking the backyard, where they often enjoyed meals when the weather permitted. Sylvie and Riley shared a love of the outdoors, which they satisfied by camping, hiking and paddleboarding in the wilds of La Ronge. Still, neither of them were too keen on staying there for long. Aside from the abundance of outdoor recreation, there wasn’t a whole lot to do in town, an area known for having high crime rates. (“I wouldn’t walk alone at night,” Sylvie says.) Plus, their MedEvac jobs often meant working 12-hour shifts, on-call and for low pay.Sylvie and Riley both hoped to find better-salaried work as commercial pilots. They were willing to live anywhere in Canada, so long as their future home was located in a safe community and was roomy enough to house the family they eventually hoped to start. Affordability was also a priority, which ruled out Toronto and Vancouver. Calgary, on the other hand, seemed reasonable. The idea of being close to the mountains scratched their adventurous itch, and Riley’s dad was located in Kelowna, a six-hour drive away. 

READ: The Move: Kelowna, B.C. to Nova Scotia for a breath of fresh air

By March of 2021, Riley had secured a job as a corporate-jet pilot for a private charter company in Calgary and took over the basement of his friend’s mom (for free) who had an apartment in Airdrie, a suburb just north of the Calgary International Airport. Sylvie found work with another local airline and moved into Riley’s bachelor pad that July. A week after her arrival, the search for their dream home finally began.

The hunt:

Sylvie and Riley’s ideal property had to fit a few key criteria: detached, with two or three bedrooms (for overnight visitors), a decently sized yard (for Lou, Sylvie’s newly adopted Labradoodle), a price tag close to $500,000 and located in a quiet neighbourhood, preferably near the airport (for obvious reasons). Riley, who describes himself as “not a city person,” wasn’t keen on living right downtown. Instead, the couple started looking in a friendly, known area with lots of green space: Airdrie.

Right off the bat, they viewed five houses. Among them was an older, six-bedroom house on a corner lot, which Sylvie and Riley nicknamed the “murder house” for its peeling wallpaper, musty cigarette smell and creepy basement, complete with a dark, narrow hallway. There was also the “museum house,” a three-bedroom split-level bungalow that was newly renovated and listed for $415,000. “It was too sterile,” Sylvie says. “It was very white and very staged. It didn’t feel homey at all.” 

The top contender was a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom detached property on a cul-de-sac in Airdrie’s Reunion-Williamstown neighbourhood, just “90 steps” from their basement apartment. It had an open-concept living room and kitchen on the main floor, three bedrooms on the upper level and an unfinished basement that was ripe for renovation. The house itself sat on a large, pie-shaped lot with a narrow front yard and a fully fenced backyard—ideal for Lou, and ideal for enjoying private outdoor meals in the summer months. “It was miles nicer than anything else we’d seen,” says Riley.

MORE: The Move: Why one family left Toronto for Vancouver Island…and 14 goats

The home was listed at $500,000—the very top end of the couple’s budget—but their agent thought they could get it for $490,000. Sylvie and Riley had scheduled another batch of viewings for the next day, so they figured they’d hold off on making an offer. But on the way home, their agent called to let them know another prospective buyer had put in a bid. “Our stomachs were in knots,” Sylvie says. “I think that’s when we realized how much we loved the house. We thought: We can’t lose it.” 

They decided to submit an offer of $490,000, based on their realtor’s advice, but soon found out the other bidder had offered the asking price—with no conditions. Sylvie and Riley decided to match the $500,000, retaining their conditions (including a home inspection). They also threw in a heartstring-plucking letter for the current owner, expressing their love for the neighbourhood, where they could imagine walking their dog and sending their future children to school. That sealed the deal.

They didn’t have long to celebrate. Sylvie and Riley agreed to a quick closing date of early August, and just two weeks later, Sylvie left for job training in Vancouver. Riley moved their shared belongings out of storage and into their new digs by himself. In fact, they only spent a total of six days together in their first two months of home ownership, thanks to their staggered work schedules. “We had just come off of doing long distance, so it was very bizarre,” Sylvie says.

They devoted any and all shared time to making their house a home: sourcing and refurbishing second-hand furniture from Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace, transforming their third bedroom into a craft area for Sylvie (she crochets and sews), and enjoying meals for two in their backyard oasis—three if you include Lou. At times, they miss their lakeside dwelling in La Ronge, but Sylvie and Riley are making do, suburb-style. There’s a pond located a couple streets’ north, which draws hockey-loving kids during the winter freeze and hosts concerts over the holidays. “There’s a strong sense of community here,” says Sylvie, happily. For all their scheduling conflicts, the couple has grown closer, too. Last Christmas Eve, Riley proposed.

The post The Move: Why two pilots willing to put down roots anywhere in Canada landed in Calgary. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

When Nicolas Sauve was a child, his parents would take him and his sister to a rented cabin by Lac-Saint-Joseph near Quebec City, where he learned to windsurf and practised soccer, taking free kicks against the cabin’s cement wall. Eventually, his passion for outdoor sports became a career. He criss-crossed the globe as a professional snowboarder for 12 years, clinching two medals at the 2011 Winter X Games. Now he works as the general manager at Sentiers du Moulin, an outdoors centre in Lac-Beauport, developing a recreational trail network in the Quebec hinterlands with enough snappy turns and steep inclines to attract mountain bikers from across the country. 

(Photo by Citizen North)

In 2018, he got word that a private developer who owned more than 900 acres of property on nearby Mont Tourbillon wanted to subdivide his land into 80 parcels. The developer offered Sauve the opportunity to purchase his pick of the lots for $60,000. (Similar lots now sell for close to $350,000.) Sauve chose a 10-acre forested property close to the top of the mountain, surrounded by trees and a series of cliffs that look like a giant staircase. But first, the town of Lac-Beauport had to approve the deal. In the end, it was agreed that each owner would open up part of their land to public recreational use.

Sauve rents out the space on Airbnb. He loves hearing from guests, who tell him all about their outdoor adventures. (Photo by Etienne Dionne)

The lot is a five-minute drive from the four-bedroom home Sauve shares with his wife, Geneviève Gaumond, an ER doctor, and their two daughters, aged three and four. The family enlisted the help of a contractor friend to help them build their dream chalet, where they could return from mountain biking or snowshoeing and warm up under sunset skies while overlooking endless vistas of boreal forest. Land-use regulations usually prohibit residential builds in the area, but Sauve’s family got an exemption when they agreed to allow recreational use on their property. The catch: their chalet’s footprint had to be no bigger than 24 square metres, which is roughly equivalent to three mid-size cars side by side.

(Photo by Nick Dignard)

Inspired by their mutual love of Québécois architect Pierre Thibault, Sauve and Gaumond envisioned a tiny two-floor retreat that used only three materials—bleached wood, grey aluminum and white tile—to minimize visual noise. The build cost roughly $400,000. “We wanted the design, textures and colours of the chalet to be linear, sober and clean, so the house kind of fades away and lets you connect with the surrounding nature,” says Sauve.

The family also had to figure out how to make the chalet feel bigger than it was. There are some much-needed space-saving hacks: the stove is only 60 centimetres wide, and the main floor connects to the upper by a small steel ladder instead of a staircase. With their indoor layout so limited, they took advantage of the outdoor space with a 30-metre patio and large glass windows. In the winter, the doors stay closed and the family enjoy a panoramic view of the snow-capped forest by the outdoor wood-burning stove. Come summer, the doors open back up, and they grill moose steaks on the barbecue.

Micro-chalet is the name and space-saving is the game. Each room was designed to balance aesthetics with compact functionality. (Photo by Citizen North)

Every time Sauve walks around the property, his mind quiets down. “You can look outside and not see a living soul for hundreds of kilometres,” he says. They get their drinking water from a well, drilled 91 metres into the earth,  which yields crystalline water that tastes remarkably crisp. The unit, which rents for $400 per night on Airbnb, is now so popular that if Sauve and his family want to spend the weekend there, they need to block off the dates months in advance. (If snowfall leads to difficult road conditions in the winter, they’ll head up the mountain on a snowmobile instead of a car.)

They’ve received a number of offers for the property, but Sauve has no intention of selling. He sees himself living there full time once his children are grown. “I can see my family paring things down to the more essential stuff.”

Sauve’s family takes part in winter sports on the surrounding land. (Photo by Citizen North)

This article appears in print in the March 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $29.99.

The post This former pro snowboarder built a dream chalet outside Quebec City appeared first on Macleans.ca.

This colossus of concrete is an enduring monument to the era of brutalist architecture—and a standout among the classical mansions on Toronto’s prestigious Bridle Path neighbourhood.

Built in the 1970s and currently on the market for $28 million, the mansion was commissioned by the Billes family—the founders of Canadian Tire—and designed by renowned Canadian architect John Parkin. Often credited with introducing Canada to the International Style of modern architecture—think boxlike structures and an abundance of concrete and glass—Parkin also designed Pearson International Airport’s old Terminal One and Toronto’s Yorkdale Shopping Centre.

For this project, Parkin was given the task of creating one of the largest concrete residential homes ever built, says Jane Zhang, one of the listing agents, who adds that concrete is what makes the place unique—even within Bridle Path. While most homes in the neighbourhood are built with wooden frames, a completely concrete home like this is an anomaly in Canada, let alone Toronto. During construction, the concrete was mixed with pink and white quartz. The advantage: all that quartz makes the concrete whiter and stronger with the passage of time.

The Billes family have since sold the 26,000-square-foot property, but the current owners have largely preserved the 1970s-era interior. 

To balance the intimidating abundance of concrete inside and out, there’s warm wooden accents in the walls and ceilings. 

Each of the mansion’s 3.5 levels are at least 14 feet high, which add to the spacious and airy feel in each of the eight bedrooms and 12 bathrooms. 

To accentuate that spaciousness, wall-to-wall windows throughout the mansion let in lots of natural light. But what really stands out is the massive atrium. Four large light shafts flood the space with sunlight year-round. 

Being stuck indoors in the cold winter months doesn’t sound too bad when you can start your day in the windowed breakfast nook overlooking the atrium. 

The Billes family was also very big on wellness. The atrium contains a 12-foot-deep indoor pool and a meditation garden. Just off the atrium, there’s a spa, gym and hot tub. 

The mansion is close to downtown Toronto—not to mention illustrious neighbours like Drake just up the road—but the Billes family also chose the location for its privacy. Compared to many other Bridle Path homes, this property avoids a lot of the traffic that goes through the neighbourhood every day. 

Surrounded by more than two acres of towering trees, the house is barely visible from the street. To take advantage of all that nature, there are multiple terraces and decks, as well as a putting green and an outdoor pool.

As is usually the case with luxury properties, there’s a long list of high-end perks here: the place comes with an elevator and a seven-car heated garage, as well as fully automated and customizable lighting, sound and security systems. 

On the main level, there’s a self-contained two-bedroom guest apartment that can also work as a housekeeper’s suite. 

The place is also great for parties. The main level has a wet bar, and downstairs, there’s a 1,700-square-foot rec room with a billiards table. A specially designed catering kitchen is close by—one of three kitchens in the home.

The post For $28 million you can buy this concrete palace built by the founder of Canadian Tire appeared first on Macleans.ca.

As a young boy in the mid-’70s, Steven Lord heard stories about his grandfather’s cottage. His father, Guy, would muse about the small wooden shack perched on New Brunswick’s Green River, 15 kilometres deep into the Atlantic Canadian wilderness and flanking the boundary of Quebec. By 2020, the cottage had long been torn down, and Lord, then a 50-year-old maintenance millwright, dreamed of rebuilding on the deserted family lot for weekend getaways with his wife, Paryse.

While perusing Facebook one night in his family home in Rivière-Verte, in northwest New Brunswick, Lord came across a post from someone in the United States who had built a cottage from a farm-grade metal grain silo. Lord wondered if he could create something similar. “I shared the idea with my wife, but she grew up on a farm where silos were mainly used for storing grain,” he said. “So she thought I was crazy.” 

The idea stuck with Lord: he thought that a rounded steel cottage would make for an imaginative replacement for the campsite he and his wife frequented on weekends in their Wildcat RV. He browsed local buy-and-sell websites like Facebook Marketplace and Kijiji for second-hand silos, and eventually found one in the nearby 200-person town of Siegas. The farmer selling it told Lord, “If you promise me that you will find a way to live in this old piece of metal, you can have it for free.” 

From there, Lord took the silo apart, packed its 50 pieces and 100 bolts into a trailer, drove it north to the 50-acre family lot, and got to work. “I had no blueprint and was totally in the dark,” he said. 

He began by hiring someone to lay a 20-by-32-foot slab of cement. From there, he sealed the silo’s rim to the ground with cement to keep the water out, and grounded the tin structure to protect it from lightning strikes. He winterproofed it by installing a heat pump and $6,000 worth of urethane insulation, dug a well, and used underground wiring to connect the shack to the provincial power grid.

Then came the indoor finishes in the main-floor living area and upstairs bedroom, which Lord called the most challenging step because of the silo’s rounded shape. To use as much of the space as possible, he lined the silo’s circular walls with cupboards and used curved flooring tiles as wall panelling. Then he procured wood from a local mill and crafted it into rounded cupboards. 

Instead of hiring construction workers, Lord kept the project in the family. He recruited his son Raphael and good friend Red as right-hand men. His 76-year-old mother painted the ladders to the upstairs bedroom, and his 84-year-old father, a retired mill worker, built the front gazebo. “My father had wanted to build something on this lot ever since we tore down my grandfather’s cottage,” said Lord, “so it was important to me that he contributed.” 

Despite his wife’s skepticism over the new DIY project, Lord was convinced he would win her over once his masterpiece made the jump from functional to stylish. He sealed the dome with a glass window to let in sunlight, then installed a satellite dish and propped a TV three quarters of the way up the south wall to create a home theatre. He tied a second TV to the north wall and connected it to an outside camera that faces the river to mimic a kitchen window. Then he punctuated the place with rustic accents: moose antlers on the wall, clocks made from motorcycle wheels and a full bear skin dangling from the top floor’s railing.

Lord finished renovating the silo in October of 2021, with building costs reaching $50,000. “The goal, apart from impressing my wife, was to create something relatively cheap and low-maintenance,” he said, adding that he kept expenses down by purchasing the doors, windowsills and ladders second-hand.  

He accomplished at least one of his goals: after spending a few weekends in their new cabin, Lord and his wife liked their new abode so much that they sold the camper and campsite in Rivière Verte. They’ve frequented the silo on most weekends since that fall: snowshoeing in the winter, canoeing in the nearby river in the summer, and sitting around bonfires year-round. The lot, 10 kilometres down a rolling dirt road that forks away from northern New Brunswick’s main highway, has no neighbours within earshot.

“We hear absolutely nothing and are completely immersed in nature like no place I’ve ever seen,” he said. “My parents enjoy the place just as much as we do, and I’m really proud of that.”

Acquaintances and occasional passers-by have asked Lord if he would build another silo home and rent it out. For now, he said, a second metal home isn’t in the works. 

“It’s funny that people are interested, but it’s not really something I want to profit from and scale,” he said. “This feels much more like a family passion project than a business opportunity.”

The post This N.B. family built a wilderness getaway out of a reclaimed grain silo appeared first on Macleans.ca.

A growing number of Canadians have fallen victim to a crime called total title fraud, in which scammers impersonate homeowners and sell their houses to unsuspecting buyers, then disappear with the profits. According to veteran insurance investigator Brian King, president and CEO of King International Advisory Group in Richmond Hill, Ontario, the problem has gotten particularly severe in the Greater Toronto Area, where skyrocketing home prices have juiced the incentives for fraudsters. In the past 18 months, King estimates that at least 30 homes in the GTA have been sold using this kind of scam. 

Despite an uptick in attention from media and law enforcement, King believes the total title fraudsters are nowhere near calling it quits. Here, he unpacks how the method moves from scammers’ imaginations to sales, and what Canadian homeowners can do to protect what’s rightfully theirs.

There have been lots of news reports in the past couple of months warning homeowners about total title fraud. How does it work?

There are two main types of total title fraud. The most common one is when a fraudster uses a fake ID to pose as a homeowner. They find the owner’s name through land title searches and use that along with a photo of themselves. Then the fraudster hires a legitimate real estate agent to list the property. Buyers typically only deal with the agent, so from their perspective, everything seems to be on the up and up. Once the sale closes and the funds are deposited into a bank account—which is also created using fake IDs—the fraudsters empty the account. The second, and more rare, type of total title fraud occurs when both the homeowners and buyers are imposters.

RELATED: A Homeowner’s Worst Nightmare

So the buyer uses a fake ID, too?

Yes. Let’s say a house is worth $2 million and it’s mortgaged by the fake buyer for $1.5 million. The fake homeowner will then claim that the buyer is a friend or relative, and that they’ve decided to forgive the remaining $500,000 owing. The bank or private lender loaning the money doesn’t care as long as the mortgage looks good on paper. The two fraudsters then split the $1.5 million, and never truly take possession of the home. They just vanish with the money.

Is this a new kind of scam?

Total title fraud has been around for a long time. I’ve been investigating real estate fraud since 1979, and every once in a while I’d have a new case of it pop up. But there’s been a substantial uptick since late 2021. I’ve investigated five total title fraud cases since then; in the past few weeks alone, I’ve been hired on two additional cases.

READ: How fraud artists are exploiting Canada’s international education boom

What explains the surge?

It partly has to do with virtual real estate transactions becoming more commonplace due to COVID—it’s harder to spot an imposter homeowner if you never meet them in person. The main contributing factor, though, is that home prices have risen considerably in the past few years. There’s more money to be made now. As one Toronto police officer told me, total title fraud is one of the frauds with the lowest risks and the highest rewards.

So how do scammers pick their victims?

They typically target houses that aren’t occupied by the homeowners—like vacant investment properties, or ones that owners are away from for an extended period of time. That way, several months can pass before the homeowners even notice a sale has occurred. In one of my current cases, a young Etobicoke couple temporarily moved to England for a two-year job opportunity. Scammers sold their home while they were overseas, and it took six months for them to figure out someone else was living in their place. By that time, the new  buyers had renovated the place to such an extent that the legitimate owners didn’t even recognize it when I showed them the photographs. To make matters worse, the scammers had sold all the former owners’ possessions, so the home wouldn’t appear lived-in when the new buyers moved in.

Who would do such a thing?

Typically, the people who pose as the homeowners are not the ringleaders. Once a house is targeted, the fraudsters thoroughly research the current owners. They can dig up details like the homeowner’s date of birth. A stand-in who is roughly the same age will usually be chosen to impersonate them. These stand-ins are paid anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 for their time, and most work for four or five different organized crime groups operating within the GTA. In each of the cases I’ve worked on, the stand-in has been able to easily fool real estate lawyers. If we were giving out awards for acting, these people would win multiple Emmys.

And the so-called ringleaders?

They’re intimately familiar with the real estate world. They usually have a mortgage broker, real estate lawyer or agent guiding and coaching them. There could be anywhere between five to 10 people working on these scams.

How often do they get caught?

All the time. Right now, my firm is investigating a mortgage broker who we suspect is involved in about 20 fraudulent mortgages. Several lawyers have been disbarred and even charged for their roles in these scams. A few of the ringleaders are before the courts right now.

What’s your role in investigating these cases?

I’m typically hired by a title insurer or the scammed homeowner’s law firm to do document examination. I first try to eliminate the possibility of the homeowners being involved. Then I work to identify and interview other potentially responsible parties. I identify red flags to figure out who the guilty parties are.

What are the red flags?

One is that the cell phone numbers and email addresses fraudsters use are never the ones used by the legitimate homeowners. Whenever real estate professionals secure a new listing, I recommend that they search for their clients online to make sure they’re dealing with the right people. The real problem arises when those agents are involved in the scam themselves—they’re  intimately aware of the weaknesses in the system and can exploit them very well.

MORE: How three sisters (and their mom) tried to swindle the CRA out of millions

How can we begin to address that sort of complicity?

If I could answer that question, we’d be able to stop these scams completely. I do think the recent publicity around these cases will help homeowners to be on the lookout. 

What can homeowners do to protect themselves?

The most important thing they can do is get title insurance. It’s a policy that protects homeowners against losses incurred due to total title fraud, or other losses related to their property’s title or ownership. A lot of people who have owned their homes for years don’t have it, but it’s very cheap to buy. It typically runs owners between $800 and $1200, and it’s a one-time fee. When a legitimate homeowner has been scammed out of their home, they do eventually get it back—even if a new buyer has already moved in. However, the court process to prove they were victims of fraud is a long one. If you don’t have title insurance, you’re the one footing the bill for that legal process. Homeowners should also watch out for any strange correspondence. If you get any unusual letters or emails, you should contact your real estate lawyer and have your title checked.

If you’re planning on vacating your house for a while, does it help to take a cue from Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone and make it seem as though your house is occupied?

It does! Measures like hiring house-sitters or leaving your vehicle parked in the driveway can keep your home off a scammer’s radar.

What about tips for buyers? You mentioned that they usually don’t meet the sellers, so it’s hard to tell if something is amiss. 

I always tell buyers to watch out for properties that aren’t listed on MLS or don’t have for-sale signs. Fraudsters are also typically in a huge rush to close a deal. If you find a house going for under market value by a motivated seller who accepts your first offer, your suspicion that the deal is too good to be true is likely accurate. Once total title fraudsters receive a half-decent offer, they’re generally going to take it and get out—before anyone catches on. 

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The post In the latest real estate scam, homes are being sold behind owners’ backs. Here’s how. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

This 10,500-square-foot St. Catharines home, situated on the southwestern banks of Lake Ontario, looks like a 19th-century English manor. But the mansion only dates back to 2000, when local businessman David Tausendfreund and his wife Lanelle built it from scratch. 

David first bought the property—and the dilapidated 1930s cottage that came with it—in 1990. He always planned to eventually replace the original cottage. It had an unremarkable stucco exterior and a cramped floor plan. Worse, it was falling apart. After renting it out for a few years, the couple finally tore down the cottage to build their dream home. 

They aimed to replicate the sort of turn-of-the-century red-brick houses once common in the nearby shipping community of Port Dalhousie, and loved the abundance of colour and blend of architectural elements from both the 18th and 19th centuries captured in the Queen Anne Revival–style homes that were all the rage in the Gilded Age. The Tausendfreunds designed the exterior with a corner turret, covered wraparound porches, red brick and elaborate white woodwork throughout. “Think Victorian, but with much more colour and intricate panelling and trim,” says David. 

The six-bed, five-bath mansion was the couple’s home for the next 20 years, as well as the setting for their wedding in 2002. During the pandemic, they relocated to Lanelle’s native Texas and listed their dream home for $6.3 million.

David, who owns a window and door company called Tradewood, says the first step in building the home was figuring out the windows. “They’re usually an afterthought in the construction process, but we designed our home around our windows,” he says. David drew up patterns of brightly coloured small glass squares to outline the windows.

For the interior, the couple envisioned an old English manor filled with oak panelling, cherry floors and leather tub chairs. In the study, David installed mahogany built-in shelving and an early 1900s tin ceiling; a similar one can be found in the basement’s billiards room. 

The pool table, a restored Brunswick Billiards original from 1890, is one of only six remaining in the world and is worth about $100,000. Unfortunately, the table’s not for sale: the Taseundfreunds are  holding onto it.

To take advantage of the majestic lakefront views, David’s company manufactured a custom floor-to-ceiling window with curved ends for a specially designed viewing room. The window, which weighed some 900 kilos, was built from hurricane-proof glass. It was so large and cumbersome it had to be craned over the completed home to be installed in its place. “Even in high winds and bad storms, we could sit by the window without any worries and watch Mother Nature do her thing,” says David.

Out in the back, David designed the glass conservatory overlooking the lake, which is where he and Lanelle exchanged their wedding vows. More recently, the conservatory was the couple’s favourite spot to watch sunsets. 

In 2010, the couple did an extensive remodel, adding an elevator to span the mansion’s four levels and doubling the size of the kitchen. The Tausendfreunds also updated the kitchen with modern appliances and a French Lacanche range cooker. 

Upstairs in the primary bedroom, David surprised Lanelle with a brand-new walk-in wardrobe. The cinematic inspiration: a closet that Mr. Big gave to Carrie in the big-screen adaptation of Sex and the City, which the couple had watched together earlier that year. “I personally think my design is superior,” says David, who added glass compartments and an elaborate chandelier.

The Tausendfreunds designed the mansion to last them a lifetime, so they’re bittersweet about letting go of the home and all their shared history there. “We always used to tell each other that we’d be buried together here,” says David. “But we’ve moved on to our next chapter, and whomever ends up buying this home will create their own memories.”

The post This Ontario dream home for sale was designed by the seller, a window manufacturer appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Jonah Samson grew up on a wild stretch of seaside in southern Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. For many generations, his family lived in Louisdale, a tiny, working-class fishing village. His great-grandfather was a lighthouse keeper, and his grandfather, an electrician, kept a sprawling garden that Samson would help tend in the summer, watching in wonder as seeds sprouted into plants. 

This memory tugged at Samson 30-odd years later. He’d bounced around Europe and lived in Halifax and Toronto before settling down in 2004 as a successful family physician and artist in Vancouver. By then, Samson’s father had divided the Cape Breton land between his four children. “My brother had already built a house right next to my parents, and then my sister built a house right next to him,” says Samson. “We essentially have a family commune all the way down the road.” He’d been living in a 600-square-foot condo and dreaming of more space to garden. In 2013, he moved to Nova Scotia, becoming the fourth Samson to build a house on the family land, and worked at a community health centre in L’Ardoise, a village about a 30-minute drive away. 

Samson’s home is the black sheep of the bunch—and an austere twist on the area’s gabled fishing shacks. To design it, he approached Omar Gandhi who, at the time, had only a few homes in his portfolio. He has since become one of the country’s buzziest architects, earning a Governor General’s Medal in 2018 and designing high-profile projects like the proposed Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Still, says Gandhi, “Of all the work we’ve ever done, Jonah’s house is the one that I hear most often that people wish was theirs. Maybe it’s because of the scale, and that people can imagine affording it.” The budget was just $300,000 for two buildings—a main house and an artist’s studio—and the footprint had to be a slim 1,200 square feet to fit the one-acre plot. 

Samson built privacy into the design: the house’s black exterior is windowless on one side

Because of the intimate nature of Samson’s work as a family doctor and the fact that he is, as he puts it, “related to absolutely everybody” in Louisdale, he wanted a private sanctuary. (He’s joked that he asked Gandhi for a house that tells strangers to “fuck off.”) And so the side of the house that faces the road is almost entirely windowless, a black boundary illuminated at night only by a slot in the bathroom that stares out like an ominous eye. “It’s like you stumble upon this perfect black composition of objects in an environment that’s completely whited out by snow,” says Gandhi, who named the residence Black Gables. To handle the punishing Atlantic winters, black metal covers the pitched roof. Samson and Gandhi loved seeing the contrast between this mysterious duo of boxes and the rest of the buildings in the community.  

The flip side of the house, however, is an expanse of welcoming windows that looks out to the water and a cluster of diminutive islands in Seal Cove. In summer, stone paths snake through tangles of bright blooms and a fledgling orchard of apple, plum, peach, cherry, pear and apricot trees that Samson planted. “In Europe, you’ll walk down the street and see huge stone walls with giant doors, but behind them are gorgeous courtyards. I like that there’s a beautiful, private surprise once you get past the front door,” he says.

Inside, a gallery wall stretches the length of the home to showcase pieces from his art collection, which contains several thousand vintage photographs. His current obsession is the work of Bob Mizer, a mid-century photographer whose playful images of loincloth-clad men influenced the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and David Hockney. “Mizer is one of the most underrated gay artists of the 20th century, who never got his due,” Samson says, who might curate a book about him in the future. 

Samson also creates his own work in the 450-square-foot studio and darkroom, often repurposing found photographs into cheeky and surreal pieces that make you see old images anew. At the moment, he’s developing silver gelatin photo prints with found negatives and, through chemical processing, erasing parts of the original images. He was inspired by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who examines the disappearance of traditional photography as it’s replaced by its digital counterpart. “What happens when physical things disappear?” Samson says. “It’s this idea of vanishing.” 

When he’s not squirrelled away in his ​studio, Samson spends his time with his French bulldog, Arlo; his greyhound, Beans; and his 10 nieces and nephews—in true commune style, childcare is a shared duty. Samson isn’t a big cook (his kitchen is tiny), but he shares many meals with his siblings. Don’t let the black exterior fool you. “We very much live together,” he says.

The post How a N.S. physician turned artist put down new roots on family land  appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Next to the B.C.-Washington border, in the shadow of the Selkirk Mountains, sits a snow-white castle that looks like a Brothers Grimm backdrop. The keepers of the property aren’t a grizzled king or a giant dragon, but owners Harmen and Dawn van Hoogevest, a musician-slash–clinical counsellor and an artist who purchased the 22-acre plot in 1971 for $7,000. Now 82 and 74 respectively, the couple are looking to downsize: they’ve listed their enchanted castle for $1.65 million, ready to pass along their custom-built kingdom to another equally imaginative owner. 

The van Hoogevests first lived in Vancouver in the 1960s, inhabiting a series of unconventional living quarters—from a leaky old fisheries-inspection boat to a school bus to a plywood box located in an orchard. Dawn, who was working as a waitress at the time, came up with the idea of pooling their pennies and buying a property where the couple could, as she put it, “really be free.” The duo dreamed of a home where they could grow their own food and nurture their creative spirits. They first laid eyes on their future castle grounds, located in Christina Lake, B.C., through an ad in the Vancouver Sun. They paid the site a visit in wintertime, tromping through five feet of snow, before putting in an offer. Immediately, Dawn and Harmen looked at one another and said, “We’re home.” 

At the time, the property’s only standing structure was a rickety log cabin with no windows—which, until then, had served as an illicit party spot for local teens. Unfazed by the squalor, Dawn and Harmen quickly covered the open windows with building plastic so they could move in. Without running water, they boiled water from a nearby creek to bathe in. For eight years, they lived on the property with no electricity, walking down the mountain every week to do laundry and buy groceries. They took work at the local sawmill to fund the construction of their dream home.

The home slowly took shape—in the form of a castle. They didn’t plan it out. “It just came out of us,” says Dawn. Carl Jung, whose theory of the collective unconscious Harmen cites as an explanation for their impulse, was an influence. The legendary psychiatrist once built his own castle-shaped home in Bollingen, Switzerland.

READ: This $3.8-million Ontario home was made from five reclaimed barns

When Harmen was growing up in Holland, he worked alongside his father, a master builder, who taught him his plastering techniques. To build the castle, the couple hand-mixed concrete in a wheelbarrow, layering it over wire mesh, insulation and paper barriers to create walls that are 18 inches thick in some places. The ultimate goal was longevity. “It can’t burn, it can’t rot and it can’t be eaten by insects,” says Harmen. “This is a house you could pass on to your great-great-great-grandchildren.”

The house’s fluid, undulating shape was inspired by the architecture of Antoni Gaudí, as well as traditional building structures, like igloos. “My dad doesn’t believe that people were meant to live in boxes,” says the couple’s son, Eric van Hoogevest.

The main portion of the three-bedroom house is a gothic arch, which encompasses the kitchen and living room. The result is a warm living space that might just be the ultimate cottagecore fantasy come to life. In some places, the ceilings are 22 feet high to create a feeling of spaciousness; in the kitchen, they top out at eight feet. 

The couple started building the house’s turret in the late 1970s. It contains three bedrooms, each with their own ensuite. A hand-built spiral staircase stretches from the main floor all the way up to the lookout. “If there’s a forest fire, you could surely see it from there,” says Dawn.

The entire house is heated by a wood-burning fireplace, but the couple recently installed a heat pump to provide extra heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. A 30,000-gallon underground cistern pipes water into the house from a nearby creek.

Adjacent to the main building is a “meditation pod”; a small dome built from concrete; a pool filled with lily pads (and a colony of turtles); and a studio where Dawn makes stained glass and sculptures, as well as a 1,450-square-foot workshop where Harmen practises cello and builds furniture. There’s also a greenhouse, fruit trees and plenty of garden space to grow vegetables. 

MORE: How a B.C. couple turned a shipping container into their dream home

The van Hoogevests feel bittersweet about selling the castle, but neither have any regrets about the ending—a happy one. “This has been a wonderful life and I would do it all over again if I had to,” Harmen says. Plus, he adds, “It’s a really fun place to live.”

The post This snow-white castle in B.C. could be yours for $1.65 million appeared first on Macleans.ca.

From the outside, Jesse Tufts’s Edmonton house looks like a handsome new home, with ample windows, a glassed-in verandah and charcoal and pine siding. But it’s not like every other house on the block: the 1,350-square-foot house, located in Edmonton’s Glenora neighbourhood, is net zero, which means it consumes as much energy as it produces.

Tufts, a mechanical engineer, and his wife, Jena, a development engineering manager, purchased the 1950s-era two-bedroom box bungalow in 2011 for $400,000. They liked the location—within biking distance of downtown Edmonton—and the big backyard. But after their first winter, they realized that the home’s postwar construction couldn’t keep the cold out; in Edmonton, temperatures regularly dip below -20 degrees Celsius. Blankets would freeze on the bed if they were too close to a wall. Frost formed on the ceilings, and condensation froze on the windows. Any time they stood next to a wall or a closed window, they could feel the cold. The couple replaced the windows, sealed baseboards with spray foam and added insulation to the basement’s bare concrete walls, but the house was still too cold whenever temperatures plummeted.

The original home, built in 1953

By 2016, the house needed more upgrades. The asphalt shingles on the roof had begun to peel, and things were getting cramped: Tufts’s sons, aged nine and four, were sharing a room. The couple planned to replace the original roof and add dormers—small rooms that jut out from the roof—to squeeze some extra square footage into the house. But when Tufts asked a carpenter friend for his opinion on the renovation, he was told that he might as well rip off the roof entirely and build a new second storey.

The two used software to play around with different configurations. They realized that with enough insulation, it would be possible to cut off natural gas entirely and heat the house only with electricity, turning the scrappy bungalow into an energy-efficient, solar-powered dream. Tufts was thrilled: as a self-described “gearhead,” he already had an interest in EV-powered cars, and he once converted a Japanese mini-truck to battery electric and learned how to home-brew biodiesel to run cars on vegetable oil. He decided to do it.

At the time, Tufts was working in R&D at a window and door manufacturer. He realized that every time a customer wanted a door with a window cutout, the company had to remove and throw away a piece of fibreglass foam insulation. He came up with the idea of gathering and upcycling the door cutouts to use as insulation for his own house. He added three layers of this insulation, bringing the energy load of the house so low that it could be heated with the power equivalent of four hair dryers on the coldest day of the year.

With a proposed budget of $250,000, he hired Butterwick Construction, which specializes in building net-zero homes, to begin rebuilding the second storey in August of 2018. The family camped out in the basement until construction was finished, and built a temporary wall blocking off the front door so builders could come and go without disrupting family life.

Once the structure was built, they wrapped the house in an exterior airtight barrier, which resembled a giant Gore-Tex jacket, to keep out the rain and wind. They sealed over the original walls on the main floor and added new walls and windows that went all the way up to the attic and right down to the foundation.

Tufts focused on longevity when it came to upgrades, spending $36,000 on durable Hardie fibre cement siding and installing a metal roof instead of a shingled one to avoid future repairs. A 12-kilowatt solar panel system was installed onto the roof, which generates about 13,000 kilowatt hours of energy a year—more than the family uses by 3,000 kilowatt hours. “We’ve been net positive since we turned the system on,” Tufts says. In the winter, when there’s less sunlight, their energy bills can cost up to $300 a month, but they receive roughly the same amount in credits during the summer. After adding up the credits he received over the course of a year, Tufts realized that the power company actually paid him $500. The house is heated by a $12,000 air-source heat pump that extracts heat from the outdoor air, even in the winter.

Even though the cost of the finished project stretched beyond $350,000, Tufts estimates that only $50,000 was directly related to the efficiency upgrades. The extra insulation and solar panels they added ended up costing far less than the siding and the metal roof. The family also took advantage of generous government rebates, getting $19,000 back from the Efficiency Alberta program that helped cover some of the overall renovation costs, including the $27,000 solar-panel installation.

Now, post-retrofit, the family has much more space—1,800 square feet compared to 1,350 before the renovation, and four bedrooms instead of two. It’s also much more comfortable. “You don’t really notice a difference until you go to someone else’s house and you sit by a window and think, This is cold and drafty,” Tufts says. “Every square foot of our house is the same temperature.” The thick insulation has also created a sound barrier: traffic noise rarely makes it inside the house.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the net-zero retrofit, Tufts says, was how easy it was to accomplish. “Even though I’m an engineer and was already involved in efficiency work, I thought it would be difficult,” he says. Achieving net zero was a ladder of opportunity, he says. “Once you get to the next step, you realize all these things become possible.”

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Early 2022 carried the promise of a joyful, back-to-normal-ish post-COVID life. Then a tsunami of gloomy news dampened our optimism: inflation, climate disasters, the brutal Russian assault on Ukraine. The ugly political polarization south of the border crept northward—and a horde of trucks in downtown Ottawa led the charge. Some depressing trends are set to continue into 2023, but there are also many rays of hope. Canada is on the forefront of the fight against climate change, developing ingenious new gadgets and technology to reduce emissions. Drones and self-driving cars are going from sci-fi to mainstream. Hospitals will run on artificial intelligence, and Canadians will cope with exorbitant housing costs by devising clever living arrangements that come with the happy side effect of making us all feel a little less alone.

Here is our guide to the Canada of tomorrow:

The post The Year Ahead: Our Guide To 2023 appeared first on Macleans.ca.

This story is part of our annual “Year Ahead” guide. Read the rest of our predictions for 2023 here.

Despite plunging property prices, housing costs will stay in the stratosphere due to rising rents and interest rates. Grassroots solutions—like community
land trusts and modular buildings—point to a brighter future.

1. We’re due for a massive housing correction

Like some kind of long-anticipated, long-feared poltergeist, it’s finally here—the big Canadian housing downturn. Thanks to relentlessly rising interest rates and declining home sales, both Desjardins and TD expect average home prices to drop 25 per cent by the end of 2023. They’ll still likely be higher than they were pre-COVID, but the provinces that benefited the most from pandemic-induced panic buying—New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and P.E.I.—will probably experience the most dramatic losses. The silver lining? Maybe people under 40 will be able to afford a home one day after all.

2. Soaring immigration will put more pressure on housing supply

Labour shortages, low birth rates and retiring baby boomers have made immigration so vital to the Canadian economy that the Trudeau government has vowed to admit a record number of permanent residents over the next few years. There’s a hitch, though: where is everyone going to live? While more housing is being built in this country than ever before, it’s still not enough to accommodate the booming population. Over the next decade, for example, Ontario alone needs to build at least a million homes, and Metro Vancouver 156,000, just to meet demand. Adding injury to, well, injury, we don’t have enough skilled construction labour to do it. 

3. First Nations in B.C. will be leading real-estate innovators

First Nations are using their historic lands in metro Vancouver to reshape the city architecturally, economically and philosophically. MST Development Corporation, a partnership between the Musqueam Indian Band, the Squamish Nation and the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, controls more than 160 acres of traditional territory the nations have collectively reclaimed, which are now the site of stunning housing developments and even a proposed film studio. The Squamish Nation, meanwhile, is developing Sen,ák¯w, a massive, 10-acre project to eventually house nearly 10,000 people in the heart of the city. Because the land is Squamish-controlled, city zoning doesn’t apply. That means Sen,ák¯w will be far denser than would otherwise be allowed—a reclamation of Indigenous authority over traditional land, and a needed injection of housing in a city facing one of Canada’s worst affordability crises. 

4. Wood will be the hot new building material on the block

If cool concrete dominated Canadian urban architecture between the 1950s and ’80s, and glass and steel typified the 2000s, then mass timber might define the next few decades. Here’s hoping it does. Mass timber is a load-bearing material, usually made of cross-laminated lumber, which is much more cost-effective than concrete or steel. It’s also greener: the wood is renewable and stores CO2. Mass-timber apartment buildings and office towers are currently springing up all over Canada and the world. They include the University of British Columbia’s Brock Commons student residence, the massive Arbora apartment complex in Montreal and George Brown College’s 10-storey Limberlost Place—Ontario’s largest such structure, slated to open in the summer of 2024.

5. Bigger, denser, taller buildings will transform our cities

Canada’s population could reach 52.5 million in the next 20 years, a rate of growth faster than any other G7 nation. Most municipalities agree that the best way to accommodate this boom is through more intensification (leaving aside Calgary’s unfettered urban sprawl and Doug Ford’s beloved superhighway 413). That means taller and denser housing within existing communities. Density is better for the climate, better for the social fabric and better for affordability. Correspondingly, the country’s skylines will be transformed over the next few years. For example: King Toronto—by starchitect Bjarke Ingels, with a striking design hearkening back to Moshe Safdie’s iconic Habitat 67 in Montreal—will open its doors. In Vancouver, we’ll see the Broadway Plan, which calls for new housing that can accommodate up to 50,000 more residents near a new subway line that’s slated to open in 2025.

6. Modular buildings will do for houses what IKEA did for furniture

IKEA perfected flat-pack furniture, Casper and Endy the bed-in-a-box. But imagine a whole house that arrives pre-cut and ready to assemble. That’s the promise of the Toronto architectural design firm R-Hauz. The company built, in just seven months, an 18-unit, mass timber building for a transitional-housing shelter in East Gwillimbury, Ontario, and is currently pioneering prefab townhouses. With fixed prices and pre-set design options, they’re designed to come together very fast and appeal to the so-called missing middle of the housing market—buyers who can’t afford a freehold home but don’t want a condo. Modular homes will be popping up across the country in the coming years: such housing is big in B.C. (Click and Nomad Microhomes) and Montreal (Blu Homes, Énergéco).  

7. House prices will fall, but rents will rise

At long last, home prices are plummeting, but that doesn’t mean housing is getting cheaper. Interest rates will keep mortgage payments lofty, while rents will continue to climb as supply remains tight. Some provinces, like B.C., have imposed caps on rent increases in 2023, but with costs already sky-high, critics don’t think the measure goes far enough. According to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board, the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto has gone up 20 per cent year-over-year (it’s now $2,481 a month), while rental listings have declined 25.6 per cent. The situation will likely get worse. The number of renters across the country is growing more quickly than owners, especially in cities like Montreal, Quebec City and Halifax, where well over 50 per cent of new dwellings built since 2016 are rented.

8. Battles between NIMBYs and developers will get nastier

As urban intensification intensifies across the country, it continues to run into its old enemy: NIMBYism. In Toronto, battles over new medium-rise buildings are constant. In Ottawa, mayoral candidate Catherine McKenney drew fire during last fall’s mayoral campaign for suggesting they would end single-family residential zoning if elected (they weren’t). Meanwhile, in Pointe-Claire and Dorval, Quebec, temporary development freezes, supported by city officials and many homeowners, have prevented the creation of multi-resident buildings until new master urban plans are created—something at least a year out. Even Pierre Poilievre is leaning into anti-NIMBY sentiment. His proposed housing policy would require severely unaffordable big cities to increase housing development by 15 per cent or lose federal funding.

9. Toronto’s transportation deficit will deepen

Torontonians have long referred to their public transit system as “The Bitter Way”—a snarky takeoff of the system’s slogan, “The Better Way.” They have good reason. Years of underfunding, service cuts and impossibly slow, politically fraught expansion have all taken their toll. The most recent insult is the delayed Eglinton Crosstown LRT. Begun in 2011 and originally scheduled to be running by 2020, it will now be lucky to be operational by the end of next year, leaving business owners throughout midtown Toronto increasingly desperate and furious. While the province broke ground in March on a long-overdue downtown relief line, that 14-stop subway route won’t be taking passengers until sometime in 2030, at the earliest. Or, as some Ontarians like to say, long after Doug Ford is out of office.

10. Community land trusts will flex their collective power

Last spring, Toronto’s Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust and Circle Community Land Trust joined forces to take over management of 637 houses from Toronto Community Housing. Designed to preserve a large swath of affordable housing, the transfer was the latest and highest-​profile example of a growing community-​organizing movement. Simply put, CLTs take land out of the market so the community can collectively own and manage it. American civil rights leaders created the concept; Bernie Sanders is a huge proponent. Closer to home, other CLTs have formed in Toronto and Vancouver, directing their efforts toward the socialization of apartment towers, laneway housing and even parking lots. Redevelopment may not be sexy, but it can be revolutionary.

This story is part of our annual “Year Ahead” guide. Read the rest of our predictions for 2023 here.

The post The Year Ahead: Real Estate in 2023 appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Rental rates are soaring across Canada. Over the past year, average rent prices have increased nearly 18 per cent in Ontario, 15 per cent in British Colombia, and 12 per cent in Alberta—while in Atlantic Canada rents have risen by a whopping 32.2 per cent compared to last year.

To help explain why, we spoke to Aled ab Iorwerth, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s deputy chief economist, who shares his expertise on the Canadian rental market and what to expect going forward: 

Tell me a bit about your role at CMHC. 

My role is to analyze housing data from an economic perspective. I’ve been in economics my entire career, but started focusing on housing and rentals in 2016. I’ve written a few major reports on housing. The first one, in 2018, examined escalating house prices across Canadian metropolitan areas. The other report, in 2022, looked at how much housing supply we needed to reach affordability. 

Safe to say you’re an expert on the topic? 

Yes. 

That’s good. So, what’s happening in the Canadian rental market right now?

We don’t think there are an adequate supply of rental units across Canada, specifically in Toronto and Vancouver. Vacancy rates are low. First, the problem is even finding a place to rent. Then, when people are changing rental units, their rents are going up significantly. 

Why is that?

It’s part of a general pattern: there’s very strong demand for housing in those two cities, and not enough housing being built. It’s driving prices up in the ownership and rental market. The additional factor now is that mortgage rates are going up, which increases the cost of home ownership. That means, instead of buying a house, people are more likely to stay in rental units, driving up the cost of renting. Higher mortgage rates, fewer home buyers, more renters. There’s also been an increase in the flow of immigration. A lot of those people will rent. In 2011, the home ownership rate in Canada peaked at 69 per cent. It’s now at 66.5 percent, whereas the growth in renter households is up 21 per cent. 

MORE: How Toronto’s housing market is transforming the rest of Canada

Low supply, high demand. I think I learned about this in high school or something. So, how much are rental prices increasing right now? 

Some provinces—like B.C., Manitoba and Ontario—have rent control policies. If you’re in a rental unit and continuing to rent the same unit in a rent-controlled province, rents have probably gone up two per cent. And if you’re changing units, rent could go up more than 10 per cent. Here’s a couple of examples of how prices have gone up. From 2011 to 2021 in Montreal, the price of a one-bedroom rental has risen from $641 a month to $821. In Toronto, over that same time period, a one-bedroom rental went up from $977 to $1,439. 

Yikes. Let’s say I wanted to find the cheapest rental in the country. Where would I look? 

In Quebec. The average rent for a two-bedroom in Quebec City and Montreal is roughly $940 a month. 

And where is it the most expensive?

Vancouver is the worst by a long shot. Monthly rent for a two-bedroom in Vancouver is $2,498. Toronto is $2,370. And to get a sense of what it looks like across the country, here are some examples: Victoria is $2,116, Halifax is $1,530 and Winnipeg is $1,406. 

Which part of the population is suffering the most from high rental prices? 

Younger people and low-income households. Given where house prices are these days, I don’t think many people are going from university straight into home ownership. 

RELATED: Rent hikes priced me out of my Toronto apartment. So I moved in with my 65-year-old aunt.

I guess we need more units. How much more housing do we need to reach affordability?

By 2030, we need 3.5 million units more than what is currently being built. In an average year, we start building somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 houses. We need to double that. 

Any suggestions?

There are a few things. We need the government to speed up the approval process for getting building and zoning permits. A lot of this has to do with the fees associated with submitting an application, which make the process lengthier and more complex. We need changes in the private sector to improve construction technology so we can build faster and at a lower cost. There’s also concern about a labour shortage in the construction industry. We need more skilled workers, whether it’s more training, or increased immigration of people with the appropriate skills. The industry needs to make itself attractive to workers. Higher wages would help, too. 

What do you expect to happen in the future? Is it going to get worse?

If things continue at this rate, with low vacancy rates and rising rent prices, the economy will start to deteriorate in cities like Toronto and Vancouver. People will be reluctant to move there. The population, GDP and quality of services will start to decline. For example, it will be too difficult to get staff at restaurants and coffee shops. So business owners will move to lower-cost cities—from Toronto to Ottawa, or Vancouver to Edmonton.

How does Canada rank around the world in terms of affordable rentals?

I’m not aware of data on that, but there’s international comparisons of house prices. In countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, house prices have gone up enormously, owing to higher levels of debt to personal income. It’s mortgage debt. Prices have gone up in other countries too, but they’ve had a commensurate increase in income. Prices have been relatively more stable in the U.S., for example. 

Pick one: rent or buy? 

Technically, we don’t give advice on renting versus buying. Our goal is to make sure everyone has a place they can afford. But here’s my concern: inflation is high across the globe right now because of the pandemic. At CMHC, we’re already projecting a slight recession next year. Employment growth will come down, people will reduce their consumption of goods and services, leading to a slowdown in the overall Canadian economy. Perhaps now is not the best time to incur large amounts of debt. If people have large amounts of debt and lose their jobs, it can be impossible to pay it off. 

That’s a roundabout way of saying rent, right? 

Yeah.

The post Rent or buy? An expert weighs in on the sky-high rental market appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In 2016, Cathi Marshall and her husband, Trevor, saw a squat, compact shipping container in the parking lot of a Kelowna shopping mall, where it was set up as a model home. Cathi, a singer-songwriter, and Trevor, a machine operator, are both mid-century-modern architecture buffs and huge fans of Frank Lloyd Wright. They adored the modern and minimal shipping-container home, manufactured by Edmonton-based Honomobo. “I loved the sleek, simple design,” she says. “It’s just a rectangle with huge windows.” 

At the time, the couple were recent empty-nesters looking to downsize from their 2,400-square-foot home in Kamloops’s Batchelor Heights neighbourhood. The house, with its three bathrooms and five bedrooms, seemed like a waste of space for just the two of them. Meanwhile, Cathi had inherited a small piece of rural land in Kamloops from her father when he died in 2015, right next to the house where her mother lived and one lot over from her brother. She decided the shipping-container house, with its giant windows, would bring her closer to family and provide amazing views of the South Thompson River. 

Giant windows wrap around the home.

The Marshalls bought a shipping-container home from Honomobo in 2017. Downsizing from the Kelowna house was easy. “It felt rather cathartic,” says Cathi. Her sons had taken most of the family sports equipment, as well as the living room furniture, when they moved out. Clothing, shoes and the rest of the furniture went to Goodwill. 

Before their new home arrived, the only prep work the Marshalls needed to do was to pour 1250 square feet of concrete to build a raft slab foundation for the containers to rest on. Less than four months after the purchase was finalized, four trucks carrying shipping containers rolled up to the property. “The trucks showed up at 10 a.m., and by 5 p.m., the house was assembled,” Cathi says. 

Over the next seven days, two employees from Honomobo added a second coat of paint and finished the drywall and flooring on the seams. Around a week later, the house was move-in ready. “One thing I enjoyed about the process of building a container home is that you have limited options,” she says. “It eliminated a lot of unnecessary anxiety.” The final product—which Cathi affectionately calls her “black box”—is reminiscent of the retro-yet-futuristic homes she adores in Palm Springs.

With both sons out of the house, the Marshalls were looking for a change.

The house is divided into two sections, joined by a breezeway in the middle. The Marshalls live in the main Honomobo shipping container; on the other side of the breezeway, they built a 396-square-foot wood-frame studio garage, which functions as a separate apartment and is available to rent on Airbnb. The electricity for the home is standard wiring, but the water comes from a 1,000-gallon cistern, located in a water shed 76 metres uphill. The house relies on passive solar energy for most of its heating needs. The winter months are usually chilly unless the sun shines directly on their home, but the black box heats up in the summer, requiring a higher-than-average level of air conditioning. 

While the entire home is only 704 square feet, its expansive windows offer panoramic views of the river and the Shuswap Highland. “You don’t get that cramped-in feeling,” Cathi says. “I step out of my house, walk 100 feet, and I’m climbing a mountain.”

Cathi spends time with her family outdoors, hiking mountains and exploring the terrain.

The region has a desert-like quality, and tangled sagebrush plants dot the landscape. When Cathi previously lived in the area with her parents, she didn’t appreciate the howls of coyotes at night or the rattlesnakes. Now she loves the local wildlife. Bighorn sheep, deer and even bears often wander onto the property. 

Even better than the proximity to nature is that of Cathi’s family. The Marshalls and Cathi’s mother and brother go on outdoorsy adventures together, including canoeing in the river, swimming out to the sandbar or hiking in the mountains. During non-wildfire months, they light up their outdoor wood oven and dine on homemade margherita pizza with a glass of wine made by Sagewood Winery, their next-door neighbours.

(Photograph of Marshall by Emily-May Olson)

This article appears in print in the December 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $8.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post How a B.C. couple turned a shipping container into their dream home appeared first on Macleans.ca.

While it might look timeworn, this newly listed seven-bed, four-bath home in the township of Uxbridge, Ontario—about an hour’s drive northeast of Toronto—was only built in 2018. The sellers, Brad and Maxine Lawrence, bought the land in 2010 with plans to eventually move there from Pickering, Ontario, and build a log cabin–style home for them and their four children. It’s on the market now for $3.8 million.

At the time, Brad was a regular viewer of Barnwood Builders, a TV show about a West Virginia company that converts old barns into modern homes. Inspired by the show, and by fond childhood memories of summer days spent playing in a barn on his family property in northern Ontario, he began fantasizing about taking on an old barn conversion project of his own. 

“So many barns are lost. They just get taken down and plowed under,” Maxine says. “Our home would give these barns a breath of life.”

The first step was sourcing barns for the reclaimed wood. They were in the market for English-style barns, which tend to include lofts that they could turn into upstairs bedrooms. Using a combination of googling and word of mouth, they tracked down a 100-year-old grain-processing barn in Owen Sound. 

In late 2017, after hiring Krista Hulshof, an Ontario architect who specializes in barn conversions, they transported the barn from Owen Sound on a 53-foot transport trailer. “Everything was carefully packed like a Jenga puzzle,” says Brad. However, the driver refused to take the trailer into the Lawrence property’s driveway because of a sharp curve en route. “In the end, we had to unload everything in a secondary site and bring it all up in smaller flatbed trucks,” Brad says. “We had small hitches like that every step of the way—nothing was straightforward about this build.”

That winter, with the barn materials finally in place, the builders erected the frame of the main section of the Lawrence family’s 6,000-square-foot future home. To support the barn roof, the builders integrated some steel, which was then concealed by barn wood to maintain the home’s aesthetic. 

In the great room, there are 27-foot ceilings and a four-sided wood-burning fireplace in the centre of the space. “We couldn’t install a stone fireplace against a wall because the additional weight would have meant completely restructuring the barn framing,” says Brad. Instead, they opted for a custom 25-foot fireplace they purchased from a Quebec company.

Brad and Maxine wanted to use reclaimed barn wood for the interior walls, ceiling and flooring as well, and quickly realized they’d need more raw material than one barn could provide. They scoured southern Ontario and tracked down four more century-old barns in Cobourg, Lindsay, Little Britain and Stouffville. “One of the barns still had cows in it the day before we took it down,” says Maxine. Because barns from that era were built with whatever trees were nearby, they contained all sorts of wood, including spruce, pine, oak and birch. It took approximately 15 months to complete construction on the home, and the Lawrence family moved in shortly after.

The kitchen contains a 23-foot island with a concrete countertop that the Lawrences mixed and poured over a weekend. Brad and Maxine used cherry to help the kitchen cabinets stand out. The adjustable cast-iron stools were purchased from Wayfair. “We felt cast iron suited the barn look,” says Maxine.

The five-piece primary ensuite bathroom comes with a large copper tub imported from the United States. “We didn’t want to use any glass or brass in the home, but we really liked the dark patina of copper,” says Maxine. All four bathrooms have heated floors and custom vanities built with the reclaimed barn wood, according to the listing agent, Steven Ferreira. 

In the basement, there’s a theatre room with surround sound and a custom 120-inch screen and film projector. To add some insulation, the Lawrences installed felt in the ceiling and then spray-painted it charcoal to blend in with the rest of the room.

On the second level is the primary bedroom. The carved-wood bed frame was purchased from Wayfair. “We went for something that was a bit softer to balance out the rest of the home,” explains Maxine. All seven bedrooms have walk-in closets. 

The family installed a pool in the backyard. For a cabana changing room, they obtained an old corrugated-steel grain bin on Kijiji. “Initially, we considered a grain silo to match the overall barn idea for our home, but we figured a smaller grain bin was more practical and would work just as well,” says Brad.

The sprawling property backs onto Walker Woods and Glen Major Forest, which contain 47 kilometres of trails. Only one of the property’s 10 acres is cleared – the rest is pure forest.

Now that the home is for sale, the family plans to downsize and spend more time travelling. “We might do another reclamation project like this down the road,” Brad says, “but definitely on a much smaller scale.”

The post This $3.8-million Ontario home was made from five reclaimed barns appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The buyer:

Dana Kayal, a 54-year-old cookware entrepreneur

The budget:

$650,000

The backstory:

In 2014, Dana moved with her three children—Jared, Ronel and Alexa—from Kelowna, B.C., to a rural property just a 15-minute drive outside of town. She hoped that the teens would benefit from more time spent outdoors. For Dana, an avid gardener, it was an opportunity to plant a bevy of fruits, veggies and robust nut trees. But her new one-acre lot, wasn’t private enough.

By 2021, Dana was once again itching to move. Her spice-and-cookware business went online just after the onset of the pandemic, and Jared and Ronel had moved out a few years prior. Alexa had just graduated from high school. Most importantly, the smoke from B.C.’s forest fires was affecting Dana’s health. “My doctor told me that, at that time, breathing the Okanagan air was equivalent to smoking two or three packs of cigarettes a day,” she says. In July of 2021, a fire started just down the road from Dana’s property. The only reason it was quickly snuffed out was because her neighbour happened to be driving by the site in a water truck en route to refill another neighbour’s well, which had dried out due to the area’s hotter-than-hot temperatures. “I thought to myself: this is ridiculous. I need to get out of here,’” she says.

An overhead shot of Dana’s Nova Scotia home.

Dana briefly considered moving to Newfoundland, where her mother lived. She wanted to be able to provide any care that her aging mom might need. But Dana, ever the green thumb, balked at the province’s unfavourable gardening conditions. (“It can be tough to grow anything other than potatoes, cabbages and beets in Newfoundland because of the cooler temperatures,” she says.) Dana’s sister, Liette, suggested Nova Scotia, where fruit trees were newly flourishing thanks to the warmer, wetter weather. Dana was a bit shocked by the extent to which climate shifts were influencing her relocation. “Climate is the biggest factor you can’t control,” she says.

The hunt:

In the summer of 2021, Dana started combing the available listings in Nova Scotia and set a budget of $550,000. She wanted a waterfront property, with at least two bedrooms and three or four acres of land for farming purposes. “I see myself as a bit of a homesteader,” she says. “I hope to be able to provide for myself, especially with rising food costs.” Dana was also looking for a property that was within a 15-minute drive of basic community amenities, like a gas station, and no more than an hour’s drive to a larger city centre. She was delighted to see how much further her budget would stretch in Nova Scotia compared to markets out west. “I was like, ‘Holy shit. Decision made,’” Dana says.

She listed her semi-rural B.C. lot in early August. It sold within a day for $990,000. With a closing date set for September, Dana figured she’d have plenty of time to find a new place, not realizing that Nova Scotia’s South Shore region—where she’d been scoping out properties—had recently become one of the fastest-growing real estate markets in the country. “I’d see a house go up online, contact the realtor and they’d be like, ‘There are four offers already,’” Dana says. She decided to increase her budget to $650,000.

Two weeks later, Dana stumbled on a listing for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home priced at $575,000. It sat on a whopping 18 acres of coveted South Shore land, including 600 feet of lake frontage on a scenic cove. “After I saw the first 12 photos, all of which were drone shots of the exterior, I thought: I’m sold. I don’t even care what it looks like inside,” Dana says. The sellers were in their 80s, so the interior decor was a bit dated, but the overall structure appeared to be in good condition. The home’s main entrance opened to a large living-and-dining room with stunning views of the lake, and the kitchen had a large island, where Dana imagined she’d film some of her online cooking classes. The basement was unfinished, but Dana never shied away from getting her hands dirty. Lastly, the property was a 45-minute drive from Halifax and a day-long trip to her mother—but that was still preferable to an expensive, last-minute flight from British Columbia. Dana submitted an offer of $650,000 the next day, which the sellers accepted contingent on an October closing date.

At the time, the rental price for a coast-to-coast U-Haul trip hovered around $10,000. Instead, Dana bought a small, used trailer, sold most of her possessions—handing down some to the kids—and packed only the essentials. She drove across Canada for eight days, stopping each night—and once in Ontario to pick up two friends who volunteered to help her settle in. The first thing the group did when they arrived at Dana’s new home was take a lakeside stroll. “We stood on the dock and cheered with some champagne,” Dana says. “All the leaves had started to turn red and orange. All the glory of nature was around me.”

Still, Mother Nature’s many moods seemed to have followed Dana eastward, and the months after move-in were a mixed bag. Dana’s well water was too high in iron, so she spent $3,000 on a new filtration system. The property also began flooding with every big downpour, and the next spring, a sinkhole opened up on the driveway. Dana spent another $20,000 to outfit her acreage with drainage ditches, which, so far, has helped.

Aside from these mini natural disasters, Dana is enjoying her new natural life in Nova Scotia. She’s planted a vegetable garden as well as seeds for a future “fruit forest”: berry bushes and peach, pear, cherry and hazelnut trees. She hikes and kayaks and ends her days watching the moonrise. In general, she breathes much easier. “The air is ridiculously clean,” Dana says. “Whenever I set foot outside, I can feel my blood pressure lower, like, This is exactly right.”

(Photography courtesy Kayal)

The post The Move: Burned out in B.C. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Garrett Rice and Shrouk Abdelgafar live in Ottawa, but they had long harboured a dream of owning a home on the water. Abdelgafar’s mother is from the seaport of Alexandria, Egypt, and Abdelgafar has always enjoyed the mellow pace and fresh seafood that come with coastal living. Rice, a senior business analyst who works in IT, and Abdelgafar, an English teacher turned civil servant, scoured real estate listings, eventually discovering an airy, wood-shingled lighthouse for sale in Lower Bedeque, P.E.I. Drawn in by its quirky character and the Northumberland Strait less than 30 metres away, they couldn’t stop imagining it as their future three-season home. There was only one problem: it was February of 2021, and the Atlantic provinces were still closed to outsiders as a pandemic precaution. The couple were unable to visit before making the purchase. “We were essentially buying a dream in a video,” says Abdelgafar.

Because the property is on a dirt road that isn’t maintained during the winter, they also had trouble securing the inspection. “The inspector made it three quarters of the way down the road, got stuck in the snow, and had to get a farmer to pull him out with his tractor,” says Rice. They decided to forgo the inspection entirely, making an offer but keeping it a secret from their family until the sale closed. “We didn’t want to seem insane,” Abdelgafar recalls. “Who buys a house without seeing it, without an inspection, in the middle of winter?”

(Photography by Stephen Harris).

Driving up the remote road for the first time six months later, they passed through a lush canopy of trees that opened up to reveal the lighthouse. “It looked like a toy from the outside,” says Abdelgafar. Inside, the first thing they noticed was how expansive the house felt—something they hadn’t been able to gauge from the photos. The abundance of windows means almost every room in the house has views of the sun setting over 183 metres of coastline. “We felt like we were in a fairy-tale land,” says Abdelgafar. “For weeks we were looking at each other going, ‘Is this real?’ ”

The lighthouse, built in 1877, was decommissioned in 1961 and turned into a private residence in 1972, according to local historians, with additions built on each side. There’s little about the interior that reflects the building’s original purpose, but there are a few subtle hints: a hatch in the kitchen ceiling opens to reveal a ladder that ascends to a six-by-six-foot observation area, for example. The view stretches so far that the couple can see fireworks displays in Summerside, a few kilometres across the water. “You definitely get the feeling that you’re in some sort of Harry Potter tower,” says Abdelgafar.

(Photography by Stephen Harris)

The second floor of the lighthouse consists of a small bedroom that Rice plans to convert into an office, and the third floor is currently dead space. Rice wants to take out the ceiling to expose the wooden beams for a more rustic feel, and replace the ladder with a staircase, so the climb will be more manageable as the couple ages.

Living in a lighthouse isn’t all idyllic views and cozy comfort. The walls of the tower taper upwards, so the fridge doesn’t sit flush against the wall, and there are visible cracks in the floor where the lighthouse joins the other sections of the house. Rice spends most of his spare time completing handy projects around the property. The gutters of the lighthouse frequently clog up with pine needles and need to be cleaned at least twice a year. Next on his list: resealing the decks to protect them from salt water. Due to pummelling ocean storms, some of the wooden shingles on the side of the house have begun to rot, and the window levers in the garage have rusted shut thanks to the salty sea air. Both need to be replaced.

(Photography by Stephen Harris).

The upkeep is worth it. Rice and Abdelgafar love watching the sailboats and shifting tides from the deck, cooking local lobster and potatoes, and exploring the province. (The couple will maintain their residence in Ottawa, spending summers in P.E.I.) They enjoy climbing up the tower to watch the sun set over the water, and walking along the beach. A long stroll by the ocean puts life in perspective. “I don’t think I need to be on my blood pressure pills anymore,” Rice jokes.

The post Why this Ottawa couple moved into a PEI lighthouse appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Crescent Drive Park in Winnipeg has always been a destination for trail-walking, skating and canoeing. But until recently, the park’s only standing structure was a 900-square-foot picnic shelter with a gable roof, built in the mid-1960s. It didn’t just lack architectural flair. The shelter’s open-air portico also meant it wasn’t visitor-friendly throughout all four seasons—and it was extremely vulnerable to rising river levels.

As flooding becomes more frequent across the Prairies, architects are designing newer structures with climate change in mind. Opened in 2021, and located at the park’s geographic high point, Forest Pavilion is built for life in the Red River flood zone. Liz Wreford and Peter Sampson, founders of Winnipeg’s Public City Architecture, drew up sketches for the $1.5-million project in 2015, and it ended up taking six years to complete. Back then, there were no federal guidelines on how to floodproof a building, so they had to consult American flood-design standards issued by FEMA.

(Photo by Lindsay Reid)

Unlike its picnicky predecessor, Forest Pavilion’s concrete base—which is below the Red River’s waterline—can stand up to a deluge. Its robust steel frame is enrobed in rough-sawn slats of Douglas fir, a strong wood that’s resistant to rot. Along with tables and washrooms, the structure’s all-season design includes an insulated room, which can function as a warming shelter or a cooling area, depending on the weather.

An open-air space, backed by a forest-inspired glowing chartreuse wall, features a fire pit made of weathering steel, with a 20-foot chimney. Visitors to Crescent Drive Park have been known to bring their own firewood, so Public City decided the building needed some welcoming touches.

“Good design leads to good stewardship,” says Wreford, who hopes Forest Pavilion becomes a go-to gathering place for the Winnipeg community—no matter the weather. So far, she seems to have gotten her wish: since its ribbon-cutting, the pavilion has housed plenty of birthday parties, cookouts and regular meetings of the local ornithological society.

(Photo by Lindsay Reid)

The post How Winnipeg’s Forest Pavilion was built with climate change in mind appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The buyers

Louie Bantugan, a 37-year-old assistant manager at a fast-food chain, and Joy Hernaez, a 45-year-old business administrator at an insurance company.

The budget

$500,000

The backstory

The pandemic inspired a wave of Canadians to shack up with family, but Louie and Joy were ahead of the game. In 2016, the couple pooled funds with Joy’s brother and sister-in-law to buy a four-bedroom, three-bathroom semi-detached house in Pickering, Ontario, in order to save money and build equity. The property was roomy, and it had to be. In addition to the two couples, Joy’s niece and nephew, her 71-year-old mother, Corazon, and the couple’s shih-tzu, Ding, would be living there, too. During COVID, Joy set up an office in the living room—which had no doors—so she would often overhear other conversations, like her brother Edizon’s work meetings. “It felt cramped,” Joy recalls. “The kids were studying there, too.” 

Last year, when their mortgage was up, Louie and Joy set out to buy their own place in the Pickering area with Corazon, so they could take care of her as she got older. They set a budget of $700,000, but even properties listed in their price range were selling in excess of $800,000. They viewed six places—detached, semis and townhomes—in the span of two months, and put in zero offers. “The market was crazy,” Joy says. “We couldn’t afford anything.” Louie’s company had locations across Canada, so they started considering listings that were further afield. Two of Joy’s Alberta-based friends suggested she look at places in Calgary, where real estate was miles more reasonable than in the Greater Toronto Area. “All I knew about Calgary was from friends who posted on Facebook that they’d gone to the Stampede,” Louie says. “We were thinking of living there as a new adventure.”

Since moving to Calgary, Louie and Joy have ventured to become a bit more outdoorsy, enjoying the Calgary scenery. (Photography by Allison Seto)

The hunt

Joy and Louie booked a week-long trip out west in September of 2021, scheduling 13 viewings with the help of a local realtor. They were aiming to spend $500,000 on a two- or three-bedroom home with a finished basement and a main-floor office for Joy. The extra funds would go toward new furniture, scratching Joy’s interior-decorating itch. 

They initially toured a couple of detached models in Calgary’s southeast end, but they lacked office space and stairs that Corazon could safely navigate. “I’m getting older too,” Joy says. “We needed a landing.” Each night, the couple shared photos and video-called with Corazon, who wasn’t picky—she just wanted more space to herself. Ten houses in, Louie and Joy were feeling discouraged but determined. “We weren’t willing to go back to Ontario without finding a new home,” says Joy. The 12th tour was the charm: they fell in love with a three-bedroom, four-bathroom detached model in the northwestern neighbourhood of Evanston. Enveloped in modern grey siding, the home had an open-concept kitchen, main-floor living and dining rooms and some all-important office space.

The couple’s open-concept kitchen in their Calgary home. (Photography by Allison Seto)

The second floor featured three bedrooms, plus a bonus room for Corazon’s sewing and soap operas. The backyard was fenced in, so Ding could roam (relatively) freely. Joy and Louie put in an on-budget offer of $500,000 after the viewing. The owners accepted and agreed to an October 2021 move-out date. 

Life in the Prairies is working out nicely: Louie’s working at a new franchise of his old restaurant. Corazon loves having enough kitchen space to make pandesal (a Filipino bread). And Joy’s meetings are no longer interrupted by her brother. One major departure from Pickering is the scenery. “We’re trying to be more outdoorsy,” Joy says, adding that they’ve already visited Banff, Ghost Lake and even the Stampede. The family has welcomed a few visitors from Ontario, but no permanent stays—yet. Louie’s sister has eyeballed the area’s prices. Her son will be headed off to university soon enough, and she could be persuaded to downsize.

This article appears in print in the October 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here, or buy the issue online here. 

The post The Move: Why this Ontario family left for Calgary appeared first on Macleans.ca.

By early 2020, artist Keiran Brennan Hinton had been living in New York for the better part of a decade, sharing an apartment in the Bronx with three roommates. He spent much of his time painting at a small studio nearby, a 320-square-foot commercial space on the sixth floor of a brick industrial building.

Born in Toronto and educated at Yale, Brennan Hinton’s quiet renderings of domestic interiors have appeared at the Art Gallery of Ontario, as well as galleries in the United States and Europe. In New York, he became increasingly drawn to the rural tableaux of Fairfield Porter and Lois Dodd—a far cry from the city’s concrete environs. He found himself dreaming of a retreat in the country where he could work outside, a practice known as plein air painting.

Around the same time, his mom, Melanie Brennan, an elementary school teacher, announced that she wanted to retire in the next few years. And so the pair set out to find a place that could serve as both art studio and eventual retirement abode. With a budget of $230,000, which would include renovations costs, Brennan Hinton began scouring listings across Ontario and upstate New York. His mode of transportation was a red Vespa, on which he’d zip down pebbly country roads lined with fields of grazing cows.

LIGHT MY FIRE | The wood stove in the living room is the building's main source of heat.

Eventually he discovered a one-room schoolhouse in Elgin, Ontario, about an hour and a half’s drive south of Ottawa, which had been built in 1918 and then shuttered in 1967. It had the original wainscoting, a bell tower, and hardwood floors that were dotted with holes where the desks had been screwed in. “I had never been in a space that felt so handmade,” says Brennan Hinton. “There were no traditional partition walls. Almost everything was built with solid wood—nothing was veneered.”

Brennan Hinton knew the property would be perfect for plein air painting. The windows had been updated for energy-saving purposes, but the originals, flecked with pink and blue paint—Brennan Hinton believes they once indicated gendered entrances—were stowed in a shed on the property. The home’s previous owner was a set builder at the Shaw Festival who had restored the building to habitability. When Brennan Hinton took possession in April of 2020, the owner had stripped away the original tin ceiling to open up the space and installed two wooden mezzanines.

SET PIECE | The previous owner, a set builder for the Shaw Festival, built an addition on the back of the schoolhouse which now serves as Brennan Hinton's art studio.

OLD AND NEW | The windows had already been updated for energy-saving purposes, but the originals were stowed in a shed on the property.

Before becoming a teacher, Melanie had studied architecture. She created the renovation plans, which included removing the mezzanine stairs that unfurled into the middle of the house and rebuilding them on the side to create a more expansive space. They also moved the bathroom, which required a plumbing overhaul. Brennan Hinton handled the framing and drywalling himself. In a nod to the building’s history, he installed milk glass light fixtures from a nearby antique store, culled from a different schoolhouse.

“I’m trying to make a space where people can daydream”

These days, Brennan Hinton splits his time between Elgin and Toronto, where he shares an apartment with his partner, curator and art critic Tatum Dooley. “There’s a freedom and lightness that comes with making work in the schoolhouse that I find refreshing,” he says. Its size, too, has benefited Brennan Hinton’s practice, giving him the space to stretch and prime canvas at home—not a task he could easily manage in his small Bronx studio. The schoolhouse has also provided inspiration for his work. A recent piece, titled “A Week in November,” captures the main floor with light streaming in. Another, called “Sun Shower,” features clothes hanging on a line outside. “You can date my paintings from the way the foliage changes outside the windows,” he says. “In October, everything is golden, in July it’s super green, and in January, when the sun is setting, the snow becomes a blanket of blue.” This fall, his schoolhouse paintings will appear in a solo show at Tokyo’s Maki Gallery.

LIFE IMITATES ART | Brennan Hinton has grown more attached to the schoolhouse by painting it.

"Each piece becomes a record of what was there and allows me to linger in a space that is constantly changing," he says.

At the schoolhouse, Brennan Hinton says, he’s able to blend timelessness with immediacy. “I’m interested in finding the nuance in it, and making paintings that feel true to a specific moment,” he explains. Neighbours and strangers often pull over on the dirt road to tell Brennan Hinton about its history. One former student recently showed Brennan Hinton where she and her classmates used to play, near a wood shed that’s still standing. Another sent him an old newspaper clipping with a photo of kids lined up outside what is now Brennan Hinton’s front door.

“I’m trying to make a space where people can daydream,” says Brennan Hinton, “and linger for a prolonged amount of time.”

This article appears in print in the September 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $8.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $29.99.

The post This painter turned a 1918 schoolhouse into the art studio of his dreams appeared first on Macleans.ca.